We were the same age, but I was much taller. She looked down, and Frau Hofmeister had the nerve to say to her, “Let’s take the stairs. When are they going to leave? They’re putting us all in such a difficult situation . . .”
As if I wasn’t listening, as if it was only my shadow standing inside the elevator. As if I didn’t exist. That’s what she wanted: for me not to exist.
The Ditmars, Hartmanns, Brauers, and Schultzes lived in our building. We rented them their apartments. The building had belonged to Mama’s family since before she was born. They were the ones who should leave. They were not from here. We were. We were more German than they were.
The elevator door closed, it started to go down, and I could still see Gretel’s feet.
“Dirty people,” I heard.
Had I heard it right? What have we done for me to have to endure that? What crime had we committed? I was not dirty. I didn’t want people to think of me as dirty. I came out of the elevator and hid under the stairs so I wouldn’t meet them again. I saw them leave the building. Gretel’s head was still bowed. She glanced backward, looking for me, perhaps wanting to apologize, but her mother pushed her on.
“What are you staring at?” she shouted.
I ran back up the stairs noisily, in tears. Yes, crying with rage and impotence because I could not tell Frau Hofmeister that she was dirtier than I was. If we bothered her, she could leave the building; it was our building. I wanted to hit the walls, smash the valuable camera my father had given me. I entered our apartment, and Mama could not understand why I was so furious.
“Hannah! Hannah!” she called out to me, but I chose to ignore her.
I went into the cold bathroom, slammed the door, and turned on the shower. I was still crying; or rather, I wanted to stop crying but found it impossible. Fully clothed and wearing my shoes, I climbed into the perfectly white bathtub. Mama kept on calling to me and then finally left me in peace. All I could hear was the sound of the scalding water cascading onto me. I let it flow into my eyes until they burned; into my ears, my nose, my mouth.
I started to take off my clothes and shoes, which were heavier because of the water and my dirtiness. I soaped myself, smeared on Mama’s bath salts that irritated my skin, and rubbed myself with a white towel to get rid of every last trace of impurity. My skin was red, as red as if it was going to peel. I turned the water even hotter, until I couldn’t take it anymore. When I came out of the shower, I collapsed on the cold black-and-white tiles.
Fortunately, I had run out of tears. I dried myself, scrubbing hard at this skin I didn’t want and which, God willing, would start to slough off after all the heat I’d subjected it to. I examined every pore in front of the steamed-up mirror: face, hands, feet, ears—everything—to see if there was any trace of impurity left. I wanted to know who was the dirty one now.
I cowered in a corner, trembling, shrinking, feeling like a slab of meat and bone. This was my only hiding place. In the end, I knew that however much I washed, burned my skin, cut my hair, gouged out my eyes, turned deaf, however much I dressed or talked differently, or took on a different name, they would always see me as impure.
It might not have been a bad idea to knock at the distinguished Frau Hofmeister’s door to ask her to check that I didn’t have any tiny stain on my skin, that she didn’t have to keep Gretel away from me, that I wasn’t a bad influence on her child, who was as blond, perfect, and immaculate as me.
I went to my room and dressed all in white and pink, the purest colors I could find in my wardrobe. I went looking for Mama and hugged her, because I knew she understood me; even though she chose to stay at home and so didn’t have to face anyone. She had built a fortress in her room, which in turn was protected by the apartment’s thick columns, in a building made up of enormous stone blocks and double windows.
I had to be quick. Leo must have already been at the station, darting all over the place, trying to stay out of the way of people running to catch their trains.
At least I knew that he thought of me as being clean.
Anna
New York, 2014
The day Dad disappeared, Mom was pregnant with me. By just three months. She had the opportunity to get rid of the baby but didn’t take it. She never lost hope that Dad would return, even after receiving the death certificate.
“Give me some proof, a trace of his DNA, then we can talk,” she always told them.
Maybe because Dad was still a stranger to her in some ways—mysterious and solitary, a man of few words—she thought he might reappear at any moment.
Dad left unaware I would be born.
“If he’d known he had a daughter on the way, he would still be here with us,” Mom insisted every September for as long as I could remember.
The day Dad never returned, Mom was going to prepare a dinner for the two of them in our spacious dining room, by the window from where you can see the trees in Morningside Park lit by bronze streetlamps. She was going to tell him the news. She still set the table that evening because she refused to admit the possibility that he was gone. She never got to open the bottle of red wine. The plates stayed on the white tablecloth for days. The food ended up in the garbage. That night, she went to bed without eating, without crying, without closing her eyes.
She lowered her gaze as she told me this. If it were up to her, the plates and the bottle would have still been on the table—and, who knows, probably also the rotting, dried-out food.
“He’ll be back,” she always insisted.
They had talked about having children. They saw it as a distant possibility, a long-term project, a dream they hadn’t given up on. What both of them were sure of was that if they did have any children one day, the boy had to be called Max and the girl, Anna. That was the only thing Dad demanded of her.
“It’s a debt I owe my family,” he would tell her.
They had been together for five years, but she never managed to get him to talk about his years in Cuba or his family.
“They’re all dead” was the only thing he’d say.
Even after so many years, that still bothered Mom.
“Your father is an enigma. But he’s the enigma I loved most in my entire life.”
Trying to resolve that enigma was a way to unburden herself. Finding the answer was her punishment.
I kept his small silver digital camera. At first, I spent hours going through the images he left on its memory card. There wasn’t a single one of Mom. Why bother, when she was always by his side? The photographs were all taken from the same spot on the narrow living room balcony. Photographs of the sun rising. Rainy days, clear days, dark or misty ones, orange days, violet-blue days. White days, with the snow covering everything. Always the sun. Dawn with a horizon line hidden by a patchwork of buildings in a silent Harlem, chimneys spewing out white smoke, the East River between two islands. Again and again, the sun—golden, grand, sometimes seeming warm, other times cold—viewed from our double glass door.
Mom told me that life is a jigsaw puzzle. She wakes up, attempting to find the correct piece, trying all the different combinations to create those distant landscapes of hers. I live to undo them so that I can discover where I came from. I am creating my own jigsaw puzzles out of photos I printed at home from the images I found on Dad’s camera.
From the day I discovered what had really happened to Dad, and Mom understood I could fend for myself, she shut herself in her bedroom and I became her caretaker. She converted her bedroom into her refuge, keeping the window overlooking the interior courtyard always closed. In dreams, I would see her falling fast asleep from the pills she took before going to bed, engulfed by her gray sheets and pillows. She said the pills helped ease the pain and knock her out. Sometimes I would say a prayer—so silent that even I could not hear or remember it—that she would stay asleep, and her pain would go away forever. I couldn’t bear to see her suffer.
Every day before I leave for school, I take her a cup of black coffee, with n
o sugar. In the evening, she sits at supper with me like a ghost while I make up stories about my classes. She listens, raises a spoon to her mouth, and smiles at me to show how grateful she is that I am still there with her, and for making her soup that she swallows out of duty.
I know she could disappear at any moment. Where would I go then?
When my school bus drops me off outside our apartment building each afternoon, the first thing I do is pick up the mail. After that, I prepare dinner for the two of us, finish my homework, and check if there are any bills to pay, which I pass on to Mom.
Today we received a large envelope with yellow, white, and red stripes and its warning in big red capital letters: DO NOT BEND. The sender is in Canada, and it is addressed to Mom. I leave it on the dining table and lie down on my bed to begin reading the book I was given at school. A few hours later, I remember that I haven’t opened the envelope.
I start knocking on Mom’s bedroom door. At this time of night? she must be thinking. She’s pretending to be asleep. Silence. I keep knocking.
Nights are sacred for her: she tries to fall asleep, reliving things she can no longer do, and thinking about what her life might have been like if she could have avoided fate or simply wiped it away.
“A package came today. I think we should open it together,” I say, but there’s no answer.
I stay at the door and then open it gently so as not to disturb her. The lights are off. She’s dozing, her body seems almost weightless, lost in the middle of the mattress. I check that she’s still breathing, still exists.
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” she murmurs, but I don’t budge.
She closes her eyes and then opens them again, turning to see me standing in the doorway, the hall light behind me—which blinds her at first, because she’s used to the dark.
“Who sent it?” she asks, but I don’t know.
I insist she come with me; that it’ll do her good to get up.
I finally manage to convince her. She stands up unsteadily, smoothing down her straight black hair, which hasn’t been cut for months. She leans on my arm for support, and we shuffle to the dining table to discover what we have been sent. Perhaps it’s a birthday present for me. Someone has remembered I’m going to be twelve, that I’ve grown up, that I exist.
She sits down slowly, with an expression on her face that seems to say, Why did you make me get out of bed and upset my routine?
When she sees the sender’s name, she picks up the envelope and clutches it to her chest. Her eyes open wide, and she says to me solemnly:
“It’s from your father’s family.”
What? But Dad didn’t have a family! He came into this world alone and left it the same way, with no one else around. I remember that his parents died in an airplane accident when he was nine. Predestined for tragedy, as Mom once said.
After their deaths, he had been brought up by Hannah, an elderly aunt we assumed was dead by now. We had no idea if they had kept in touch by telephone, letters, or email. His only family. I was called Anna in her honor.
The package was mailed from Canada but it’s really from Havana, the capital of the Caribbean island where Dad was born. When we open it, we see it contains a second envelope. “For Anna, from Hannah” is written on the outside in big, shaky handwriting. This isn’t a present, I think. It must contain documents or who knows what. It probably has nothing to do with my birthday. Or maybe it’s from the last person to see Dad alive, who has finally decided to send us his things. Twelve years later.
I’m so nervous, I can’t stop moving around, getting up and sitting down again. I walk to the corner of the room and back. I start playing with a lock of my hair, twisting and twisting it until it’s tangled. It feels like Dad is with us again. Mom opens the second envelope. All we find inside are old photograph contact sheets, and lots of negatives, together with a magazine—in German?—from March 1939. On the cover is the image of a smiling blond girl in profile.
“The German Girl,” says Mom, translating the title of the magazine. “She looks like you,” she tells me mysteriously.
These photos make me think I can begin a fresh puzzle now. I’m going to enjoy myself with all these images that have reached us from the island where Dad was born. I’m so excited at the discovery, but I was hoping to find Dad’s watch, an heirloom from his grandfather Max, which still worked, or his white gold wedding band, or his rimless spectacles. These are the details I remember about Dad from the photo I always keep with me, and which sleeps beside me every night under a pillow that used to be his.
The package has nothing to do with Dad. Not with his death, anyway.
We don’t recognize any of the people. It’s hard to make out such small, blurred images printed on sheets that seem to have survived a shipwreck. Dad could have been one of them. No, that’s impossible.
“These photos are seventy years old or more,” Mom explains. “I don’t think even your grandfather was born then.”
“We have to get them printed tomorrow,” I say, controlling my excitement to avoid upsetting her. She goes on studying the mysterious images; those faces from the past she is trying to decipher.
“Anna, they’re from before the war,” she says, so seriously it startles me. Now I’m even more confused. What war is she talking about?
We go through the negatives and come across a faded old postcard. She picks it up with great care, as though she’s afraid it might fall to pieces.
On one side, a ship. On the other, a dedication.
My heart starts racing. This must be a clue, but the date on the card is May 23, 1939, so I don’t think it has anything to do with Dad’s disappearance. Mom is handling this postcard like some kind of archaeologist, like she needs to put on a pair of silk gloves so that it won’t be harmed. For the first time in ages, she seems alive.
“It’s time to find out who Dad is,” I say, using the present tense just as Mom does whenever she mentions him. I stare at the face of the German girl.
I am sure my father isn’t coming back, that I lost him forever one sunny day in September. But I want to know more about him. I don’t have anyone else, apart from my mother, who lives shut away in a dark room overwhelmed by gloomy thoughts she won’t share with anyone. I know sometimes there are no answers, and we have to accept it, but I can’t understand why, when they got married, she didn’t find out more about him; try to get to know him better. By now, it’s way too late. But that’s how Mom is.
Now we have a project. At least, I do. I think we’re about to discover an important clue. Mom goes back to her room, but I’m ready now to snap her out of her passiveness. I hold on to this object sent by a distant relative who I am now desperate to get to know. I prop the small card against my bedside lamp and turn down the brightness. Then I get into bed, pull up the covers, and stare at the picture until I fall asleep.
The postcard shows an ocean liner bearing the name St. Louis, Hamburg-Amerika Linie. The message is written in German: “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag Hannah.” Signed: “Der Kapitän.”
Continue Reading…
The German Girl
Armando Lucas Correa
About the Author
ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA is an award-winning journalist, editor, author, and the recipient of several awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the Society of Professional Journalism. He is the author of the international bestseller The German Girl, which has been published in thirteen languages. He lives in New York City with his partner and their three children.
Visit ArmandoLucasCorrea.com.
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The German Girl
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English translation © 2019 by emanaluC Production Corp.
Spanish edition published in 2019 by Atria Español as La hija olvidada.
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The Daughter's Tale Page 26