I stepped outside and breathed in deeply. The perpetual dampness of London still didn’t feel like home to me, and I didn’t think it ever would. I would give anything to be back in Gutenstat, in the bookshop with Max, at the Lyceum with Herr Fruchtenwalder, at the bakeshop with Gerta, or standing inside Elsa and Johann’s tiny parlor admiring their adorable daughters. That it was all gone felt impossible, unbelievable. I was anesthetized and empty, and I didn’t think I would ever feel alive again.
But you are free, I thought to myself, and then this feeling of relief washed over me. Though it immediately seemed an odd thing to think, an odd relief to feel.
The next morning at the hospital, I was given a pile of handwritten records and a typewriter. I plonked them out slowly, one letter at a time, finger by finger, nothing at all like the other women in the room who typed effortlessly, not even looking at their hands. They typed the way I played the violin.
It was hot inside the records room, and I began to feel nauseated. By ten thirty I was more than ready for a break and asked the shift supervisor, Mary, if I could take my thirty-minute allotted lunch. Mary was a tall blond-haired woman with a thick Irish accent, and though she frowned at my request she waved me off with her hand, and I assumed that meant yes. My position was, thankfully, only part-time and I would be finished for the day at two, in time to meet my nephews at the Academy and walk them home. But as the ninety minutes between nine and ten thirty had already felt interminable, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to make it.
I walked up a flight of stairs to the hospital cafeteria, and though I wasn’t all that hungry, I appreciated that ration books weren’t needed for food here and bought a biscuit and a cup of tea. I sat at a table in the corner and picked at the biscuit with my fingers, not really eating any of it, feeling guilty as I remembered Julia yelling at me that people were still starving. So I forced a few bites down.
“Excuse me.” A man’s voice startled me, and I looked up. I’d never seen him before. He was middle-aged, with a shock of red hair and freckles, wearing a white lab coat with Dr. Childs embroidered across the chest in blue writing. “You’re Friedrich’s sister-in-law, aren’t you?”
I wasn’t used to being identified in relation to Friedrich, as someone’s sister-in-law even. I was Hanna Ginsberg, the violinist. But I supposed here in London, in the hospital, I was just Friedrich’s sister-in-law. I nodded.
“I’m Henry Childs.” He held out his hand to shake but I didn’t take it, not sure what he wanted with me, and not in the mood to make friends. He lowered his arm back to his side. “Sorry to interrupt your lunch,” he said, glancing at my mostly uneaten biscuit in crumbles on my napkin. “Friedrich told me about what . . . happened to you.”
“Which part?” I said curtly.
“All of it . . . I think?” He pulled out the other chair at the table. “May I sit?” He didn’t wait for me to answer before sitting down, and I sighed, not really wanting to talk to him, or anyone. “My speciality is the mind. My research is in memory to be exact. We’ve had a lot of soldiers come back from the war, missing pieces of time. Even those who don’t seem to have a physical injury.” I remembered what Herr Doctor said to me in Berlin: not a physical trauma. But something else, something that had made my mind retreat back to that night with Max in the bookshop. I bit my lip to keep the tears from welling up. “And, well, I was hoping you’d want to talk to me about what happened,” he said.
“There’s nothing to say.” I stood and wrapped my biscuit crumbs in the napkin, looking around for the trash. Henry Childs stood, too, took the napkin from my hand, and walked it to the trash can himself. I walked toward the exit of the cafeteria. I did not want to talk to him about what happened, about everything I’d had once in Germany that had been stolen from me. I didn’t care what his specialty was, and I was annoyed with Friedrich for talking about my personal matters with his colleagues, behind my back.
“I’ve developed some methods . . .” he called after me. “Some have even recovered their memories.”
I stopped walking. Did I even want to recover my memory?
What I wanted was to have it all back, Max, my violin, my life with him in Gutenstat. But I didn’t know where Max was now, and if I remembered something, maybe it would lead me to him. But what if what I remembered was too awful to imagine? What if there was a reason for forgetting?
“If you ever want to stop by my office before work . . . I come in early. I’m on the fourth floor,” Dr. Childs called out.
I resumed walking, pretending that I didn’t hear him calling after me.
The truth was, I would think about Henry Childs a lot over the next few weeks and months, and yet I hadn’t been able to bring myself to actually go to his office on the fourth floor.
I was caught between feeling stifled in this new life, desperately wanting Max and my violin and that feeling of belonging, that feeling I once had of being in love and beautiful and alive. Between that and . . . this: Julia and my nephews and the stupid typing job. I developed a routine, a new normal. But I walked through each day dazed and numb. I began to understand that if I was ever going to feel anything again, I was going to have to accept all this as my new reality. I was going to have to find a new way to experience love and joy.
But the thing was, I couldn’t accept it. At night after Julia and the boys went to sleep, I’d take out my violin in the darkness of my bedroom, finger through pieces, hearing them in my mind, feeling them in my heart. It was the only way I kept from going insane, really, remembering that there was that fire within me, feeling it, however briefly and silently.
I would finger through pieces until I was too tired to keep my eyes open, and then I would fall into a restless sleep, where I would dream again about my violin, but many times the dreams turned into nightmares, and I would wake up terrified, not remembering who or what I was scared of, only feeling that in my dream I had been fighting for my life.
I dreamed a lot of Max, too. I’d be so happy when I’d go back to the bookshop in my sleep, and deeply sad when I’d wake up and it would all be gone, again and again and again. I’d spent so many nights there that the bookshop was like my home. Max was my home. And when I dreamed myself there it was all so real again, so close. I could smell the books, could feel Max’s strong hands on my face, my skin. I kissed him, and I could feel his tall, lean body against mine, like it was for real.
But the dreams often ended ugly, like all the others. The door to the shop would break open, the SA would be there, men in their ugly brown uniforms, commanding me to play violin for them. I would wake sweating again, Max’s name on my lips.
“Max,” I’d call out into the darkness, to no one. I knew I was safe, in London, in Julia’s house. But I no longer felt truly safe.
By December I was utterly exhausted, barely sleeping, barely eating. Not truly playing violin. I was a hollow version of myself.
Mamele had believed so deeply in my talent for violin; she had encouraged me since I was a young girl, and after she died, Max had believed in me. But now I had only myself, and I was exhausted and I didn’t know what to believe in anymore. I didn’t want to live my life feeling sad and empty all the time, but I didn’t know how to stop feeling this way.
Could Henry Childs really help me? I began to wonder.
I had to try something. I had to talk to someone. And one very chilly morning in December, I stepped out of Julia’s house before dawn, made my way to the hospital and up to the fourth floor, and I knocked on Henry Childs’s door.
Max, 1932
Hanna began spending most Saturday nights staying over at his apartment, inventing excuses about why she suddenly needed to stay at Gerta’s so much. Max had yet to meet her mother, or her sister, Julia, and when he asked her when he might, she simply shook her head and made a face.
“Are you ashamed of me?” he asked her.
“You?” She put her small hand on his cheek. “No. Never,” she said. “Julia is awful sometimes.
And my mother’s illness can be . . . unpredictable.” Hanna’s mother had something wrong with her heart, and sometimes it would cause her to be extraordinarily tired, and other times it would cause her lungs to fill up with fluid and, Hanna had told him with a shudder, result in a terrible cough.
But if their relationship was going to be serious, forever, as Max already hoped it would, he was going to have to meet her family, get to know them, no matter if Julia was awful or her mother was sick. They were still her family. “Come on,” he said to her, time after time. “Just invite me over for dinner.”
And she would laugh and shake her head or change the subject by kissing him, moving her hands to his belt buckle. And when she touched him, he would barely be able to think or breathe, much less ask questions, and then the conversation would be over for the time being. They would make love, and he would drift off into an easy sleep. And sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of her violin coming from his shop below, and he would lie in bed and feel her music in the darkness.
During the week Max didn’t see Hanna much. She was practicing, taking her courses and lessons at the Lyceum, and he hadn’t enrolled in anything this semester. The economy hadn’t improved; in fact, it had only worsened. Adolf Hitler garnered enough votes in the election in March that he forced a runoff in April. Max didn’t believe he would actually win, but it was still hard to imagine that a growing number of his countrymen supported a man whose party outwardly despised Jews. He was worried, for Hanna and her family and what his country was turning into. But when he tried to talk to her about it, she shooed his concerns away.
“He’ll never win,” she said. “Don’t worry so much. People have been hating Jews since the beginning of time. So what?”
And maybe that was true, but now he felt it in the air, even when he walked down the street or rode the train. People said things, made rude comments about Jews out in the open, as if it were nothing. Anti-Semitism had become an electric undercurrent in their country, and Hanna, wrapped in her violin, wrapped in the relative cocoon of the Lyceum, hadn’t noticed as he had.
With the nest egg from his father, Max could continue to operate the shop for years to come, even only turning the barest of profits or no profit at all. But he did not see his entire life, his entire future stretched out before him in Gutenstat, as he once had. Maybe there was a life beyond this? Hanna would audition for the symphony soon enough, and though he had promised his father he never would, he considered leaving the shop. His father would’ve wanted him to be happy, to be in love, even if it meant leaving their family’s shop behind.
He told Hanna as much one Saturday night, whispered it in her ear as they both lay naked in his bed, that he would go anywhere with her, that he would travel anywhere with her once she made it into the symphony and they were touring. Or at the very least, he would move into the heart of Berlin, close to where they practiced each day, and start a new life with her there. “You would give up everything for me?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“You are everything,” he told her.
The week before the runoff election in April, Hanna finally invited Max to meet her mother and Julia. Julia had just announced she’d gotten engaged to her beau, Friedrich, and Hanna said that Julia and her mother were both in high spirits. Julia was bringing Friedrich to the Friday-night Sabbath dinner, so she’d told them that she was bringing a friend as well.
“A friend?” Max teased her. But inwardly he was a little hurt. He was finally going to meet her family, but she hadn’t told them the truth about how they felt about each other. “So I shouldn’t do this at dinner then?” He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, pulling her close up against him.
She pulled back and frowned, not amused. “I hope you’re joking.”
He was joking. Of course he wouldn’t kiss her like that in front of her mother and sister. But he would want to hold her hand, touch her arm, or brush her hair back. He couldn’t be near her without touching her. “It’ll be obvious that I’m in love with you,” Max told her. “I can’t help it.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I waited to invite you to dinner until I was sure I was in love with you, too.”
On his way to Hanna’s apartment on Friday, Max stopped at the flower shop, wanting to find the perfect flowers to bring with him to impress Frau Ginsberg. He’d pressed his suit the night before, too, and he was trying not to move too much and wrinkle it. He’d closed the shop early, at four, so he had plenty of time to stop for flowers and catch the train and get to Maulbeerstrasse with time to spare before sundown.
Inside the flower shop, he spotted fire lilies, like the ones he’d brought for Hanna’s recital that night he first kissed her. But he wanted something softer for Hanna’s mother and sister. He finally settled on a bouquet of yellow and pink roses. He held them close to his chest after he bought them, not wanting the petals to bruise or break on the crowded train.
It had been a while since he’d been to Maulbeerstrasse, or near it. And the first thing he noticed after he got off the train was the Nazi symbol, the broken cross, Hakenkreuz, painted large and red and ugly on the side of building zwei, Hanna’s building. Was this new, or had Hanna just decided not to mention it to him when he’d told her how he’d begun to worry about the climate now in Germany?
Jews have been hated since the beginning of time, she’d told him.
But staring at the ugly symbol defacing the side of her building he felt anger rising up inside of him, and he thought: not quite like this.
The inside of Hanna’s apartment was roomier than he’d pictured from seeing it on the outside. There was a large parlor in the front where Frau Ginsberg sat on the sofa, a crocheted green blanket covering her legs, and empty chairs on the side where Julia, Hanna’s sister, invited him to sit. She’d been cooking in the kitchen, and she wiped her hands on her apron before shaking his hand. “Friedrich will be here soon,” she said, as way of introduction as if she had no use for Max, but Friedrich might. He handed her the flowers, and she thanked him. Then she walked back to the kitchen, taking the flowers with her. She looked a lot like Hanna, a little taller, a little older, her hair pulled back a little tighter. But she didn’t seem awful as Hanna had said, just busy cooking, and not all that interested in him.
Hanna sat down at the end of the sofa and tightened the blanket around her mother’s legs. “Get me a cup of tea, would you, meine Liebling?” Hanna’s mother asked her. Hanna glanced at Max and hesitated a little. “Go ahead,” her mother said. “We can talk. Get to know each other.” Max smiled at Frau Ginsberg, wanting to seem agreeable, wanting her to like him, so badly.
Hanna stood. Her face looked funny, her features tight. When she played the violin, when she kissed him, her eyes were bright, her face animated. There was a darkness to her now, a shadow, that he hadn’t seen before. He smiled at her, to reassure her, though he was a little nervous about being left alone with her mother. But then Hanna turned and went into the kitchen to make her mother tea.
“So,” Frau Ginsberg said, lowering her voice a little. “What are your intentions with my daughter?” She was to the point, he would give her that.
“I . . .” Hanna had said that she’d told her mother he was a friend. Should he lie or tell her the truth? He quickly decided he would share his feelings. “I love Hanna very much,” he said.
“Love?” She grimaced and began to cough. Her cough sounded terrible, but neither Hanna nor Julia ran in. It was sad to think this must be normal for her. “Excuse me,” she said, putting her hand to her throat.
“Can I get you something?” he asked.
She shook her head, waved away his offer with her hand. She wheezed a little more, then gathered her composure. “Beissinger,” she finally said. “What kind of name is that?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer her in a way that would make her happy, but she kept staring at him, waiting. “My great-grandfather was one of the founders of Gutenstat,”
he finally said. “My grandfather opened our bookshop there and ran it until he died. Then my father ran it, and now, since he’s passed, it’s my shop.”
She nodded. “Businessmen, yes? But they were not Jews, no?”
“No,” he said. “The Beissingers were Protestants. My mother was Catholic. I’m not a practicing anything,” he said. “I wasn’t raised religious.”
“Eh.” She waved her hand in the air, as if being a nonpracticing Christian were even worse than being a practicing one.
Did she think that because he wasn’t Jewish he might support Hitler and the NSDAP ideas about Jews? “I don’t think a person’s religion matters,” he said quickly. “I mean, it doesn’t matter to me. I love Jews.” His cheeks burned as he spoke, the words sounding all wrong.
And Hanna rushed in from the kitchen with a steaming cup of tea. The look on her face told Max she’d caught the tail end of their conversation. He clamped his mouth shut. “Here you go, Mamele. Nice and hot. Let it cool down before you sip.” She placed it on the end table next to her mother and sat back down on the couch.
“On second thought,” her mother said. “I’m feeling very tired. Help me to bed, meine Liebling.”
“But the Sabbath dinner . . . Julia has made a lot of food. We even splurged on a brisket for our company.”
“I’m not very hungry. And Friedrich is on his way. You’ll have two men here to eat all the food. Help me up and go fetch my sweater. I’m quite cold.”
Hanna frowned but didn’t protest further. She walked into the other room to get the sweater, then put it over her mother’s shoulders and helped her stand. Frau Ginsberg walked slowly over to Max and held out her hand to shake. “It was nice to meet you, Herr Beissinger,” she said, and before he could tell her to call him Max, that Herr Beissinger was his father, she leaned in closer and lowered her voice a little. “You’re wasting your time, though,” she said. “My Hanna needs to concentrate on her violin right now. And besides, she will only ever love and marry a Jewish man.”
In Another Time Page 7