Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  “Why did you decide to visit a concentration camp while in Berlin?” I asked, wondering what someone so clearly non-Jewish and so young and normal-looking would be doing on a tour like that.

  “Don’t you think it’s important,” he asked, “to learn about those things?”

  “It happened to my family. What’s your relationship to it?”

  He cleared his throat and pushed his drink away. “It’s obvious to you, no?”

  “Was your family involved somehow?”

  “No, they were not, but in some way I think we all feel connected to this event, from both sides. We all participated in a way, even just by being bystanders.”

  I remembered meeting a German man in my coffee shop back home. Peter was his name; he had been born shortly after the war. “Every German has a story,” he had told me, “of being refused service, or of a door slamming in their face, or of a hand left dangling during an introduction. We take it for granted. But when I was a child in school, history stopped at the First World War. The education about the Holocaust didn’t start until recently, until people felt they could sufficiently separate themselves from the actions of the Nazis.”

  I walked back through the streets of the Scheunenviertel, the old Jewish neighborhood, in the late afternoon. There were some lovely, quiet side streets, with neat rows of beautifully restored homes once occupied by working-class Jewish families, now gentrified by skinny jeans–wearing residents. I approached a beautiful gated park, and then noticed the haunting sculpture at the entrance. This was once the Jewish cemetery, I read. Since the stones had been completely destroyed by the Nazis, it was now a public park. I saw a young mother and her toddler in there, and the little girl was running down the garden path on chubby legs, squealing happily. My heart skipped a beat at the sight. Did that mother know her daughter was running over the desecrated graves of Jews, that their violated bones lay just beneath her innocent soles? What kind of reality is this, to raise children on the very streets on which so much blood was spilled, and so much havoc wrought? Did that young woman ever stop to think about it? Wouldn’t she eventually have to explain it to her child, once she grew old enough to read the words on that sculpture for herself?

  I burned with the desire to ask them this but remained silent, watching. It was difficult to admit that I had come here wanting the satisfaction of knowing that this earth was somehow permanently scorched, that it couldn’t sustain a replete life anymore. But here were children frolicking among the ghosts, as if none of it had occurred. To my right, a group of artists were working on a colorful mosaic on the wall of the apartment building next to the cemetery. It was a happy mosaic of dolphins and butterflies. The banner beside it read, “The Peace Wall Project.”

  Finally, on the way back, I saw my first Stolpersteine, those stumbling stones I had searched for so fervently in Salzburg. I noticed it by accident, embedded in front of an elegant home, four of them grouped together, a name on each one. They were for a family that had lived there. The stones gave the date of their deportation as well as of their death. Yet from above they seemed so innocent, a part of the touristy decor. How chilling it was to think of the people who walked over these stones nonchalantly every day. Even more haunting to think of the people who now built their lives in the apartments that had been systematically freed up for “true” Germans. Did this generation not have to worry about guilt anymore? Could they simply blame it all on their ancestors and say those were crazy times and we had nothing to do with it? Even so, how could one stand to be around all of these reminders? I could never live in Germany, I thought, not when I risked running into memorials around every corner.

  Odd’s wife, Turid, called unexpectedly. She and her daughters were staying in their apartment nearby. They took me out to lunch, which was comforting. Alone in Berlin, I had felt disoriented and uneasy, and it was nice to sit with people I knew for an hour and recoup my sense of self.

  “We’re heading back to Norway tomorrow,” Turid said as we paid the check. “Why don’t you come visit us before you leave for the States?”

  Germany had positively exhausted me, and I was only too happy to agree. On my last night in Berlin, I dreamed that a war had broken out while I was still abroad, and the airline canceled my ticket. The only way home that remained was through a German airport, but it had already been occupied by Nazis. “That’s okay,” Markus said. “We’ll smuggle you out.” But his friend Wolfgang gave me up to the authorities just before I awoke.

  The next day I caught a train to Denmark, where I would take a ferry across the Skagerrak to the seaside village where Odd lived. I sat next to a divorced single father and his seven-year-old daughter, and as the ride was quite long, we started to converse. I asked what it was like, learning about the Holocaust as a child.

  “I must have been seven years old when my class visited Auschwitz on a field trip,” he told me.

  “How did you feel?” I asked, almost dreading the answer. I couldn’t even imagine a child that age, a child like his daughter sitting across from us clinging to her doll, being shown such a horrific place.

  “To be honest, I felt nothing,” he said. “I was simply too young to even process what was happening, I think, so my brain simply rejected the whole experience. I think it was only when I was older that I was able to read about it and deal with the information.”

  “Do you think it’s wrong, that the educational system allows for the exposure to this kind of information at such a young age?” I asked.

  “What can you do? It happened. We have to educate the kids about it, otherwise how are we going to stop it from happening again?”

  “Surely, you don’t believe that eliminating the possibility of another Holocaust rests wholly on the education of young Germans? That would be like saying there was something genetically or culturally built into them that has to be eradicated.”

  “But it was the Germans who did it, after all, not anybody else. What does that say? Is it not dangerous to ignore that basic fact?”

  At that point in our conversation, his daughter began to resent not being the focus of her father’s attention and tugged on his sleeve as he was explaining his views to me. He brushed her off a few times before getting frustrated and reaching over to force her back into her seat on the other side of the table. She began to cry loudly, and her tears soon escalated into a full-on tantrum.

  “Her mother spoils her so much,” the man said. “I’m the only one who provides any discipline.” Then he proceeded to grab his daughter by the shoulders and shake her, quite hard, while ordering her to stop her antics. Her high-pitched wails became shrieks that filled the entire train car. Bystanders watched uncomfortably. The old woman sitting next to us looked extremely distressed; I could tell she was thinking of intervening. I cringed as I watched the situation worsen; the daughter’s shrieks were positively terrifying at this point, and her father was growing angrier and angrier.

  Eventually her tears subsided into whimpers, and she spent the rest of the ride huddled against the window, clutching her doll. As they left the train, her father handed me his card. “Call me next time you’re passing through,” he said.

  I felt a quiet joy wash over me when I first caught a glimpse of Odd’s estate; already I knew that my stay here would smooth over all the knots and bumps in my spirit that had formed on my trip. The property featured a small complex of buildings painted brick red and arranged around a lovely courtyard filled with haunting sculptures—a small Viking boat, a maternal angel. But what immediately drew the eye was the vast sea beyond, with its Neolithic rock formations scattered out into the horizon like a treacherous series of steps. Between the sea and the home, flowers grew wild and tall, in many different colors. Somewhere out on a rock was a sculpture of a man meditating peacefully while facing the water. I had the sense of being outside of time.

  Over a dinner of freshly caught salmon and a salad of her
bs and nettles just picked from the garden, Odd and I drank a crisp white wine that put us both in a talkative mood before the meal was halfway through.

  I told him a little bit about my trip. He was impressed with how much ground I’d managed to cover in so little time.

  “Deborah, what is it about the Jews that makes them so smart?” he asked. “I think it’s because they’ve had to be so vigilant! Did I ever tell you the story about the lobsters?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Those lobsters that we have here in Norway are lucky enough to live in calm waters, where they don’t have to fear many predators. A few years ago an experiment was conducted in which a boatload of Scandinavian lobsters was transplanted into the sea outside Shanghai. Do you know what they have in the waters in Shanghai, Deborah?” Odd looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.

  “I don’t believe I do. Please go on,” I said.

  “Sharks. Lots and lots of sharks. Do you know what those scientists found when they went to check on those lobsters three years later?”

  “What did they find?” I looked over at Aftur and Minden; they were smiling as if they’d heard this story before.

  “Those little lobster brains had swelled to three times their original size!” Odd roared. “You see, Deborah? They had to become vigilant! This made them very smart. I believe that’s why the Jews are such an exceptional people. They are always living in foreign places, and have to ward off predators. They’ve got bigger brains!”

  “I guess that’s a possibility,” I said, amused. But inside, I was wondering: Was smarter necessarily better? How had having giant new brains helped those poor little lobsters, wrenched from their peaceful life in the North Sea?

  It did not get dark there in the summertime, even at night. Turid and the girls and I ventured out on the rocks at around ten o’clock in the evening, when they had their nightly swim in the freezing sea. They tried to get me to join them. I managed to get in up to my waist, but it was too cold for a real swim, in my opinion. Aftur found a purple sea star and put it on my leg. She pointed out the pulsing jellyfish that swam near the rocks, all of them poisonous, one a translucent purple color, the other bright pink. I had never seen one outside an aquarium before. When I withdrew from the water into the chilly night air, I could feel my skin throbbing and stinging from the high salt content. I was promptly bitten by three klegger, or Norwegian horseflies, and my calves swelled and turned red.

  We dressed and joined Odd in the Fire Room, where a blaze was already roaring in the hearth. Turid sat down on the floor directly in front of it. Odd was nursing a tumbler full of cognac in his easy chair. I curled up on a sofa next to Börk.

  Odd seemed to want to talk about Jews again. When he was little, he said, the only people who ever noticed his talent were Jews. A Jewish woman in his town gave him art books and encouraged his drawing. He longed to be around Jews today, but there weren’t many who crossed his path anymore, at least not in Norway.

  “Aftur told me you were born on the border, during the war, while your mother was trying to escape, is that right?”

  “Yes. And then when I was fifty, I found out my father wasn’t my real father after all.”

  I hadn’t heard about this before.

  “My mother wouldn’t tell me who my real father was. She has refused, no matter how many times I’ve asked her. For this reason I hate her. I have tried to find out myself, to do research. Right away I realized that if she was so ashamed, and kept it a secret for so long, that it must have been a Nazi. There were many Nazis in Norway at that time, and they fathered quite a few children, and after the war those children suffered like hell in Norway.”

  “Who do you think your father is?”

  “Himmler.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being serious. I made a shocked face.

  “Look, I’ll show you something.” He played a clip from the movie Downfall on his little tablet computer. It was a scene where Hitler had gathered all his nearest and dearest and said good-bye to them as they prepared to leave Berlin for safer territory. As Hitler left the room after parting with Himmler, just as the scene was about to end, one could see the twitch of Himmler’s head meeting his shoulder, the same Tourette’s tic shared by Odd and his son Ode.

  “We have exactly the same tic. Himmler and my mother were in the same place right around the time I was conceived. I have often pondered this. But she will not even have this discussion with me.”

  “My God, to even wonder such a thing. I cannot imagine it.”

  “Apparently Himmler fathered many children,” Odd said.

  During the day I watched Odd paint in the enormous barnlike structure he had designed for that purpose, the sloping ceiling fading into dim light, the sun pouring weakly in from the open door. He was working on several large canvases at the time—all of them scenes of desolation or barrenness in some way; a family clinging to each other in an arctic wasteland, a community in postapocalyptic mourning for lost land and home. In one painting, parents stood in the ocean while their child stared straight at the viewer; it was the face of Minden, Odd’s daughter. Even in the scenes of intimacy, the eyes told stories of enormous bereavement and violation.

  As Odd touched a brush to a cheek or an eye, adding imperceptible glimmers of light that made bones seem to pop under their skin, Börk and Ode stood around with various apparatuses designed to direct light one way or another; students painted on small easels in the corners; Aftur and Minden watched from the sidelines. All was quiet and focused. When Odd sat down to drink a glass of water and rest for a moment, he turned to where I was sitting, reading one of his books, and said, “I live under a black cloud, Deborah.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My whole life I have lived under it and fought against it, and it is always trying to overtake me.”

  “You mean the one we all struggle against to create something.”

  “It’s a terrible thing to labor under.”

  I could see from the expression on his face that despite the life he had created, and the family that rallied around him like ramparts, he truly did live in the prison of that black cloud, just like every artistic creature I’d ever met. Even though he’d established all the things he thought he needed for security and happiness, his internal alienation could never be rectified. Just like I was beginning to discover, a home did not guarantee peace or security, success did not mean self-validation, and most important, other people thinking they knew who you were did not give you an identity.

  This is how it is for us, and how it will always be for us, Odd, Richard, myself—though we have been recognized by the public, we now know just how deep the chasm is that lies between ourselves and the personas of us that are out in the world. Certainly we will never be finished with the struggle to know ourselves.

  Odd came to say good-bye to me the morning I left for the airport. He seemed sad.

  “I do so love the company of Jews, Deborah,” he said. “If only more of them came through here.” He hugged me and kissed my cheek, and I wished I could find the words to tell him how comforting it had been to see his world from the inside, that learning of his alienation had made my own seem somehow less lonely. But as I looked at his face, I could see that he already knew; it was as if we spoke a secret language.

  I didn’t know how many more opportunities I’d get to see him; it seemed I was always drawing inspiration from the old, who were bound to leave this world sooner than I would have liked, leaving me to fend for myself when I might not be ready yet.

  At the airport, I called Markus. We had not spoken in a while. I had been distracted.

  “I was wondering if you’d call,” he said. “I thought that with our not being together, maybe you felt your passions ease up a bit.”

  “Is that the case with you?”

  “If anything, my passions have increased.”

/>   “Then why assume that it’s different for me?”

  “I guess we are always afraid.”

  “Do you remember that part in Pride and Prejudice where Darcy tells Elizabeth he loves her against his better judgment, despite the inferiority of her connections, and she’s so insulted?”

  “Mmmm,” he said.

  “I guess I love you against my better judgment. Against the part of me that says you live too far away and you’re descended from Nazis, against it’s too damn hard to make this work. I can’t believe I let this happen.”

  “I guess you could say that I love you too, against the odds, I believe I do, yes,” he said, as if he was checking internally to make sure.

  I felt my stomach sinking. “What are we going to do? This can’t possibly work out.”

  “I’m coming to visit you in September,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  “Okay,” I whispered. “I have to get on the plane now.”

  “Call me when you get home.”

  “I will.”

  I settled into my seat and peered out the window, remembering a time a few years back when I left New Orleans, feeling in every bone of my body the pain of separation from Conor. But there was no pain now. I was older, and loss and endings in my life no longer felt like the end of me. Whether or not this worked didn’t have such high stakes for me anymore. I had stopped being a survivor who couldn’t handle disappointment and had started being a person like any other, secure enough in myself and my life to deal with the buffeting of external forces.

  VIII

  reincarnation

  Isaac and I flew to California on my twenty-seventh birthday to visit Justine, with whom I had stayed three years earlier on my first trip to the West Coast before driving cross-country. I spent the day scared and anxious. Twenty-seven! Why was that such a big number for me? It had been five years since I’d left, since the first birthday when I had started the ritual of measuring my progress. I had acknowledged that the transition years would be difficult. I had allowed myself a few miserable years; I had not been naïve about what to expect. And I found myself at my birthday each year thereafter assessing how far I’d come, internally and externally, from the last. And as my external world had shaped itself so exquisitely from year to year, I lamented at my slow-to-catch-up internal self, which still felt displaced and depersonalized.