The Daughter's Tale
Page 25
2. When Lina is rescued by Claire and Father Marcel in the forest, she is forced to hide in an attic room to avoid the suspicion of the neighbors. Her life in the attic is lonely and difficult. When a beetle she named Jepri dies, Lina thinks to herself that “Jepri’s death meant the end of her childhood.” This moment feels so poignant, and is reminiscent of Anne’s experience in The Diary of Anne Frank. Reread selections from Anne’s diary aloud with your book club. Do you hear an echo of Anne in Lina’s words? How does each girl view and cope with her circumstances?
3. Although The Daughter’s Tale is heartbreaking, there are small moments of joy throughout the novel. One such lighthearted moment occurs in Marie-Louise’s home after the war ends (p. 271). Host a gathering with your book club and listen to the song “Je voudrais un joli bâteau” (1934) that Danielle and Elise dance to with Marie-Louise. How does the song make you feel? Do you find that music, like books or flowers, contains healing powers?
A Conversation with Armando Lucas Correa
This is your second novel set in Nazi-occupied Europe. How did the experience of writing this book compare to that of The German Girl? Did you find one more challenging than the other to write?
I spent over a decade doing research about the MS Saint Louis and writing The German Girl. The process was emotionally draining, because of its history and because it was my first novel. With The Daughter’s Tale I enjoyed the process much more because I was able to play with the language; I avoided using first-person narrative, and I wrote with a lot less anxiety, if that’s even possible.
Both The German Girl and The Daughter’s Tale explore themes of memory and trauma. What draws you to these themes?
I grew up with the story of the Saint Louis from the time I was a young boy, though it was a forbidden topic in Cuba. My grandmother, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, was shocked when Cuba refused entry to the Jewish refugees onboard the Saint Louis. I too am a product of exile; I’m an immigrant as well. I came to the U.S., leaving my family behind, leaving my books. When you’re exiled, you try to set down roots, but you always live—consciously or not—with the fear of loss. I’ve always been interested in historical events, mainly from WWII, which show human vileness and are forgotten in time. They cannot be forgotten. I’m afraid of forgetting.
Discuss the structure of the narrative. Why did you decide to bookend the story with the point of view of Elise as an older woman? Why not just set the entire novel in the past?
One always lives with a secret. Sometimes it’s huge, sometimes it’s very small. But as insignificant as it may seem, it’s still a secret. We safeguard them and tend to forget them. I wanted that to be the premise. In my case, I tend to forget the negative, the sad, the illnesses. First because resentment cannot survive in me; I can’t deal with the energy around resentment. Second because it’s healthier, and a defense mechanism. In the book, I wanted to sum it all up in one secret: forgetting, pain, guilt, betrayal. The only problem is that secrets and lies are always exposed, brought to light, in the end.
Why did you choose to write about the horrific crimes committed in Oradour-sur-Glane? What was the research process like? Did you uncover any facts that were particularly surprising?
There are many events from WWII that tend to be glossed over, forgotten. For example, the Saint Louis tragedy is just now being revived. Why did we avoid talking about the Saint Louis? It’s one thing to say Hitler killed more than six million Jews but to face the fact that the rest of the world turned its face away from that monstrosity, let those crimes unfold in front of them—and that it was Cuba, the U.S., and Canada who sent more than nine hundred Jewish refugees aboard the Saint Louis to their death—is equally painful. Some say it’s better to forget.
The same happened with Oradour-sur-Glane. The SS ordered and directed the massacre of more than six hundred people who were burnt alive inside a church. But we choose to ignore that many French soldiers, under Nazi command, perpetrated that crime.
I looked for documents, read many books about the massacre in Oradour. I saw the before and after images of the town, but when I visited and spent the day among the ruins I was crushed by their dimension. It was a city, not a couple of buildings and a church. When you go there, you see the impact of the crime is so much greater. Then, there’s the cemetery where you find the graves of all the people who perished. Entire families.
The Daughter’s Tale takes on the paradoxes of love and war. For example, Amanda muses “she had always loved her [daughter], and that it was precisely that love which had led her to abandon her.” Do you view paradox as a central theme in the novel? Is the paradox of these moments due to the circumstances of war, or do you think paradoxes like these are simply part of the human condition?
Paradoxes are an essential part of human existence. Abandonment can be proof of love. As parents, we spend our lives sacrificing for our children. There are sacrifices that lead to loss. I don’t think I could survive it. I admire Amanda so much. She lost her parents, then her beloved library, then her husband. To save her daughters, she had to abandon them. Truly, I could not.
After Amanda sacrifices her life to save Lina’s, Lina takes over as the narrator of the novel. Discuss this transition. How do you get in the right headspace to switch character perspectives?
Lina is the hope. Lina is in essence the result of all of Amanda’s sacrifices. They were worth it because even in death, Amanda had saved Viera, even though she wasn’t certain of it at the time. But she did the best she could. The good thing is that Lina can say goodbye knowing the truth.
What is your next project?
I spent four years writing a novel, The Silence in Her Eyes, a psychological thriller. When I finished The German Girl, to give myself a break, I would work on Silence. It was my therapy, my way of returning to normalcy. When I finished The Daughter’s Tale, I went back to Silence and spent a year finishing it. It takes place in New York, in the present, in my apartment building, in my neighborhood. It begins with a twenty-eight-year-old woman who suffers from akinetopsia, a strange yet irreversible neurological illness that makes her blind to movement. She sees the world only in still images; she registers movement as trails of light. The night her mother passes away, she returns to her apartment all alone, and her world takes a turn from which she will never recover.
Now I’m taking some time to finish the last part of what I call my WWII trilogy and hopefully The Silence in Her Eyes will give my readers a respite before it comes out. Well, sort of a respite, because I’m sure that some readers won’t be able to sleep for a few days after reading it.
More from the Author
The German Girl
Keep reading for a preview of
The German Girl
by
Armando Lucas Correa
Hannah and Anna
Berlin–New York
Hannah
Berlin, 1939
I was almost twelve years old when I decided to kill my parents.
I had made up my mind. I’d go to bed and wait until they fell asleep. That was always easy to tell because Papa would lock the big, heavy double windows and close the thick greenish-bronze curtains. He’d repeat the same things he said every night after supper, which in those days had become little more than a steaming bowl of tasteless soup.
“There’s nothing to be done. It’s all over. We have to leave.”
Then Mama would start shouting, her voice cracking as she blamed him. She’d pace the whole apartment—her fortress at the heart of a sinking city; the only space she’d known for more than four months—until she wore herself out. Then she’d embrace Papa, and her feeble moans would finally cease.
I’d wait a couple of hours. They wouldn’t put up any resistance. I knew Papa had already given up and was willing to go. Mama would be more difficult, but she took so many sleeping pills, she’d be fast asleep, steeped in her jasmine and geranium essences. Although she had gradually inc
reased the dose, she still awakened during the night crying. I would rush to see what had happened, but all I could make out through the half-open door was Mama inconsolable in Papa’s arms, like a little girl recovering from a terrible nightmare. Except that, for her, the nightmare was being awake.
Nobody heard my cries anymore; nobody bothered about them. Papa told me I was strong. I would survive whatever happened. But not Mama. The pain was gnawing away at her. She was the child in a house where daylight was no longer allowed. For four months, she had been sobbing each night, ever since the city was covered in broken glass and filled with the constant stench of gunpowder, metal, and smoke. That was when they started planning our escape. They decided we’d abandon the house where I was born, and forbade me to go to school, where nobody liked me anymore. Then Papa gave me my second camera.
“So that you can leave a trail out of the labyrinth like Ariadne,” he whispered.
I dared to think it would be best to be rid of them.
I thought about diluting aspirin in Papa’s food or stealing Mama’s sleeping pills—she wouldn’t last a week without them. The only problem was, first of all, my doubts. How many aspirin would he have to swallow to give him a lethal ulcer, internal bleeding? How long could Mama really survive without sleep? Anything bloody was out of the question, because I couldn’t bear the sight of blood. So the best thing would be for them to die of suffocation. To smother them with a huge feather pillow. Mama made it clear that her dream had always been for death to take her by surprise while she slept. “I can’t bear farewells,” she would say, staring straight at me—or, if I wasn’t listening, she would grab me by the arm and squeeze it with the little strength she had left.
One night I woke up during the night in tears, thinking my crime had already been committed. I could see my parents’ lifeless bodies but was unable to shed a single tear. I felt free. Now there would be no one to force me to move to a filthy neighborhood, to leave behind my books, my photographs, my cameras, to live with the terror of being poisoned by your own father and mother.
I started to tremble. I called out “Papa!” But no one came to my rescue. “Mama!” There was no going back. What had I turned into? How did I end up so low? What would I do with their bodies? How long would it take for them to decompose?
Everyone would think it was suicide. No one would question it. My parents had been suffering constantly for four months by then. Others would see me as an orphan; I’d see myself as a murderer. My crime existed in the dictionary. I looked it up. What a dreadful word. Just saying it gave me the shivers. Parricide. I tried to repeat it and couldn’t. I was a murderer.
It was so easy to identify my crime, my guilt, my agony. What about my parents, who were planning to get rid of me? What was the name for someone who killed their children? Was that such a terrible crime there wasn’t even a word for it in the dictionary? That meant they could get away with it. Whereas I had to bear the weight of death and a nauseating word. You could kill your parents, your brothers and sisters. But not your children.
I prowled through the rooms, which to me seemed increasingly small and dark, in a house that would soon no longer be ours. I looked up at the unreachable ceiling, walked down hallways lined with the images of a family that was disappearing little by little. Light from the lamp with the snowy-white shade in Papa’s library filtered out into the corridor where I stood disoriented, unable to move. I watched as my pale hands turned golden.
I opened my eyes and was in the same bedroom, surrounded by well-worn books and dolls I had never played with, nor ever would. I closed my eyes and sensed it wouldn’t be long before we fled without a set destination on a huge ocean liner from a port in this country where we had never belonged.
In the end, I didn’t kill my parents. I didn’t have to. Papa and Mama were the guilty ones. They forced me to throw myself into the abyss alongside them.
The apartment’s smell had become intolerable. I didn’t understand how Mama could live between those walls lined with moss-green silk that swallowed what little daylight there was at that time of year. It was the smell of enclosure.
We had less time to live. I knew it; I felt it. We wouldn’t be spending the summer there in Berlin. Mama had put mothballs in the closets to preserve her world, and the pungent odor filled the apartment. I had no idea what she was trying to protect, since we were going to lose everything regardless.
“You smell like the old ladies on Grosse Hamburger Strasse,” Leo taunted me. Leo was my only friend; the one person who dared look me in the face without wanting to spit on me.
Spring in Berlin was cold and rainy, but Papa often left without taking his coat. Whenever he went out in those days, he wouldn’t wait for the elevator but took the stairs, which creaked as he trod on them. I wasn’t allowed to use the stairs, though. He didn’t walk down because he was in a hurry but because he didn’t want to bump into anyone else from the building. The five families living on the floors beneath ours were all waiting for us to leave. Those who were once our friends were no longer friendly. Those who used to thank Papa or who tried to ingratiate themselves with Mama and her friends—who praised her good taste or asked for advice on how to make a brightly colored handbag match their fashionable shoes—now looked down their noses at us and could denounce us at any moment.
Mama spent yet another day without going out. Every morning when she got up, she would fasten her ruby earrings and smooth back her beautiful, thick hair—which was the envy of her friends whenever she appeared in the tearoom of the Hotel Adlon. Papa called her the Goddess, because she was so fascinated by the cinema, which was her only contact with the outside world. She would never miss the first night of any film starring the real screen goddess, “La Divine” Greta Garbo, at the Palast.
“She’s more German than anyone,” she would insist whenever she mentioned the divine Garbo, who was, in fact, Swedish. But back then motion pictures were silent, and no one cared where the star had been born.
We discovered her. We always knew she would be worshipped. We appreciated her before anybody else; that’s why Hollywood noticed her. And in her first talkie she said in perfect German: “Whisky—aber nicht zu knapp!”
Sometimes when they came back from the cinema, Mama was still in tears. “I love sad endings—in movies,” she explained. “Comedies weren’t meant for me.”
She would swoon in Papa’s arms, raise a hand to her brow, the other holding up the silk train of a cascading dress, toss back her head, and start talking in French.
“Armand, Armand . . .” she would repeat languidly and with a strong accent, like La Divine herself.
And Papa would call her “my Camille.”
“Espère, mon ami, et sois bien certain d’une chose, c’est que, quoi qu’il arrive, ta Marguerite te restera,” she would reply, laughing hysterically. “Dumas sounds ghastly in German, doesn’t he?”
But Mama no longer went anywhere.
“Too many smashed windows” had been her excuse ever since the previous November’s terrible pogrom, when Papa had lost his job. He had been arrested at his university office and taken to the station on Grolmanstrasse, kept incommunicado for an offense we never understood. He shared a windowless cell with Leo’s father, Herr Martin. After they were released, the two would get together daily—and that worried Mama even more, as if they were planning an escape she was not prepared for yet. Fear was what prevented her from leaving her fortress. She lived in a state of constant agitation. Before, she used to go to the elegant salon at the Hotel Kaiserhof, just a few blocks away, but eventually it was full of the people who hated us: the ones who thought they were pure, whom Leo called Ogres.
In the past, she would boast about Berlin. If she went on a shopping spree to Paris, she always stayed at the Ritz; and if she accompanied Papa to a lecture or concert in Vienna, at the Imperial:
“But we have the Adlon, our Grand Hotel on the Unter den Linden. La Divine stayed there, and immortalized it on screen.”
>
During those days, she would peer out the window, trying to find a reason for what was happening. What had become of her happy years? What had she been sentenced to, and why? She felt she was paying for the offenses of others: her parents, grandparents—every one of her ancestors throughout the centuries.
“I’m German, Hannah. I am a Strauss. Alma Strauss. Isn’t that enough, Hannah?” she said to me in German, and then in Spanish, and in English, and finally in French. As if someone were listening to her; as if to make her message entirely clear in each of the four languages she spoke fluently.
I had agreed to meet Leo that day to go take photographs. We would see each other every afternoon at Frau Falkenhorst’s café near Hackescher Markt. Whenever she spotted us, the owner would smile and call us “bandits.” We liked that. If either of us was later than expected, the first to arrive had to order a hot chocolate. Sometimes we’d arrange to meet at the café near the Alexanderplatz Station exit, which had shelves filled with sweets wrapped in silver paper. When he needed to see me urgently, Leo would wait for me at the newspaper kiosk near my home, allowing us to avoid running into any of our neighbors, who, despite also being our tenants, always shunned us.
In order not to disobey the adults, I bypassed the carpeted stairs, which were increasingly dusty, and took the elevator. It stopped at the third floor.
“Hello, Frau Hofmeister,” I said, smiling at her daughter, Gretel, who used to be my playmate. Gretel was sad, because not long before, she had lost her beautiful white puppy. I felt so sorry for her.