Except that someone had already accepted us. An island in the middle of the Americas was going to take us in and allow us to live there like any other family. We would work, become Cubans, and that was where our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would be born.
“We’re leaving on the thirteenth of May,” said Leo, striding out ahead. I followed him without asking anything. “We’ll leave from Hamburg, bound for Havana.”
May 13 was a Saturday. Thank heavens we were not leaving on a Tuesday, the day of the week we dreaded most.
A muddy stone. A shard of smoked glass. A dry leaf. Those were the only souvenirs of Berlin that I hid in my suitcase on the thirteenth of May. Every morning, I would wander aimlessly around our apartment, clutching the stone. Sometimes I waited hours for Mama. She always promised when she went out that she would be back before noon, but she never kept her word. If anything happened to her, I would have to go with Leo. Or perhaps Eva could say I was a distant relative and take me in. No one would discover I was impure. I would get new identity papers and would stay with the woman who had been there at my birth, and end up helping her with the chores in other people’s homes.
The documents for the transfer of our possessions were all ready. The building, the apartment where I was born, the furniture, the ornaments, my books, my dolls.
Mama managed to get her most precious jewels out of Berlin thanks to a friend who worked in the embassy of some exotic country. The only thing she refused to hand over were the deeds to our family mausoleum, which didn’t interest the Ogres because it was in our cemetery out in Weissensee. That was where my grandparents and great-grandparents had been laid to rest, and that was where we were supposed to end up ourselves, but I was sure they would obliterate that place just as they had obliterated so many other things.
At the time, there was a proliferation of fake documents to resettle in Palestine and England; anyone felt they could take advantage of our desperate situation to rob and swindle us. Sometimes it was the Ogres, but other times it was cruel informers who were responsible. There was nobody we could trust.
That was why Mama made sure that our permits to enter Cuba as refugees were genuine.
“As well as a hundred fifty American dollars for each permit, I paid another five hundred as a deposit. That’s as a guarantee that we won’t look for work on the island and won’t be a burden on the country,” she explained, turning her back on me.
We were going to a tiny island that boasted being the largest in the Caribbean. A spit of land between North and South America. But that tiny spit was the only place opening its doors to us.
“According to the atlas, it is part of the Western world,” she declared with some satisfaction.
We were to depart from Hamburg and cross the Atlantic Ocean on a German ship. But however much we wanted to go, there was no way we could feel completely safe on a boat with a crew of Ogres.
“The first-class passages will cost us about eight hundred reichsmarks,” Mama went on, “and the company is demanding we buy return tickets, even though they know we will never come back.”
Everyone took advantage of us.
She came back early that day, because Papa was supposed to be coming home. She was wearing a black dress as a kind of anticipated mourning, and a white belt that she couldn’t stop adjusting. Her face was clean, with very little makeup. She no longer used false eyelashes or penciled in her eyebrows or used eye shadow. She was a different woman.
Sitting on the edge of the seat with her hands folded on her lap, she looked as though she were an unruly pupil being punished in the school she no longer sent me to because they wouldn’t have me.
“Stay calm,” she told me as she saw me pacing up and down the huge, dust-filled room.
Papa was climbing the stairs. We could hear him. There he was! We were leaving! We did it! We were going to live on a spit of land, Papa, where there were no seasons, only summer. Wet and dry. I read that in the atlas.
When he came in, Papa seemed even taller than before. His glasses were twisted. His hair had been completely shaved off. His shirt collar was so dirty it was impossible to tell what color it was. But his gaunt appearance made him look even more noble: despite the hunger, the pain, and the stench, he was still erect. I ran over to him, hugged him, and he burst into tears. Don’t cry, Papa. You are my strength. You’re safe here now with the two of us.
I stayed there holding him tight, and breathed in his smell of sweat and sewers. I could hear his jerky breath, his heaving chest. He raised his head and looked at Mama.
He kissed me on the forehead like a baby, while Mama started to bring him up to date. I would have loved to know where this woman, who before never left the apartment and spent her days sobbing, had found this sudden strength. I could not get used to the new Alma. I was even more astonished when I heard her speak.
“We only have two exit visas signed by the Cuban state department, because they have just published a new decree restricting the entry of German refugees to the island.” Mama did not even pause for breath. “But that doesn’t matter: the Hamburg-Amerika Line is going to sell tourist visas for a limited period, signed by the director-general of immigration, somebody called Manuel Benítez.”
She tried to pronounce his name in perfect Spanish.
“We need only one. If we can get a Benítez”—she had already christened the lifesaving visas with his name—“stamped by the Cuban consulate, you’ll be able to leave with us. But we have to avoid buying it through intermediaries. It would be better to purchase three of them, so we can all travel with the same documents.”
“What other option would we have if we can’t get a Benítez?” I piped up. “Go anyway, and leave Papa in Berlin?”
She didn’t answer me but went on with her breathless explanation:
“At least we have two first-class cabins reserved for us. That’s a guarantee. The problem is we’re only authorized to take ten reichsmarks per person.”
That meant twenty reichsmarks for my parents and ten for me. The sum total of our fortune. We could hide some more cash, but that would be too risky: they could take away our landing permits. Or perhaps we could sneak out Papa’s watch, or some other jewel. That would be a great help.
“Until we reach Havana, we won’t have access to our Canadian account. It will be a two-week voyage, not much more,” Mama went on calmly. “We can stay for the first few days in the Hotel Nacional, until our transit house is ready. We’ll be there a month, or perhaps a year. Who knows.”
She finished giving Papa all the news and then shut herself in her room. She didn’t embrace him: only pecked him coldly on each cheek. We had no more family; we were alone. Over the previous few months, we had lost all our friends. Everybody was trying to survive any way he or she could.
And Leo? They must have helped Leo and his father with their tickets.
Papa’s arrival prevented me from going to meet my friend. Instead, he came to look for me, and when I went down to let him in, I saw that Frau Hofmeister was harassing him.
“Get out of here, you dirty mongrel! This isn’t a garbage heap!”
We ran to the Tiergarten park. We didn’t have much time left, and Leo knew it. He and his father still didn’t have their visas.
“They’re running out of them,” he told me. “And we don’t have your papa’s, either.”
Not only that, but we had a fresh problem: our parents were planning to do away with us all if we didn’t manage to leave Berlin. Leo was sure of it.
He had heard them talking about a lethal poison. He knew all about it.
“Nowadays cyanide is as precious as gold,” he explained, as if he were a dealer himself.
He’s spinning me a yarn, I thought, and didn’t believe him. Nobody wanted to die. We all wanted to flee; that was what we most wanted in the world.
“Your father said he would prefer to disappear than to go back into a cell,” Leo said in a grave voice. He had stopped running.
“He asked my papa to buy three capsules for your family on the black market. Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I don’t, Leo,” I said, gasping for air.
“Cyanide capsules became popular during the Great War . . .” Leo adopted the tone of a traveling circus barker about to present some phenomenon of nature. His father should have realized that this boy always overheard his conversations. Leo was dangerous.
“It was better to die than to be taken prisoner. They took away your weapons, but you could hide a tiny capsule under your tongue if need be, or in a filling.” Leo dramatized every phrase, waving his arms in the air. He paused to see if I was furious or scared.
“The capsules don’t dissolve easily. They’re coated in a thin glass film to prevent them from breaking accidentally. When the moment comes, you bite the glass and swallow the potassium cyanide.” At this, he acted out a comic pantomime, throwing himself to the ground, shuddering, trembling, holding his breath, opening his eyes wide, coughing. Then he came back to life and started up again.
“The solution is so concentrated that, when it enters the digestive system, it produces brain death on the spot,” he said, taking a deep breath and standing as still as a statue.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” I asked, playing along.
“It’s a perfect death, Hannah,” he whispered. Then he began to sweep his arms through the air again. “It destroys your mind so that you feel nothing, and then your heart stops beating.”
That at least was some consolation: a death without pain or blood. I would have fainted if I saw blood, and I could not bear pain, either.
If our parents abandoned us, the capsules would be perfect for the two of us. We would fall asleep and that would be that.
I leaned back against a wall plastered with posters. “Millions of men with no work. Millions of children with no future. Save the German people!” I am German, too. Who was going to save me?
“You have to find them,” Leo ordered me. “Search your whole apartment. You can’t leave without them. We have to throw them away.”
“Get rid of something that’s worth its weight in gold, Leo? Wouldn’t it be better to keep them and sell them?”
Yet another problem: now I was going to have to check carefully everything they gave me to eat, although I didn’t really think they would mix the contents of the capsule with my food, because I would notice right away. I wanted to know what cyanide smelled like. It must have a special texture, a taste that made it stand out, but Leo didn’t mention that. I would have to look into it more closely. Every second counted.
They could come to my bed after I had fallen asleep, open my mouth, and sprinkle in the powder from the broken capsule. I wouldn’t shout or cry. I would simply stare at them so that they could see how I was fading away; how my heart had stopped beating.
My parents were desperate, and in a crisis they’d act without thinking. Anything was possible. I didn’t expect any good from them. But they could not decide for me: I was about to turn twelve.
I didn’t need them. I could escape with Leo; we would grow up together. Leo, help me get out of here.
I went home to sleep and to try to forget about the cyanide, at least for a few hours. The next day, as soon as Papa and Mama left, I would start the search.
I woke up later than usual; Leo had exhausted me. I took advantage of being on my own to start exploring in the safe hidden behind Grandpa’s portrait in Papa’s study. The combination was still my birth date, but when I opened the small door, all I found inside were documents: piles of envelopes.
Next I looked in the jewelry box. Nothing. Then Papa’s untouchable briefcase. I checked every drawer in the apartment, even those I had never opened before. I searched in books, behind ornaments. I went over to the gramophone and carefully felt inside the trumpet. Nothing. I searched and searched. The capsules were nowhere to be found.
They probably took them with them. That was the only possibility. Perhaps Papa kept them in his fat wallet. Or, who knew, in his mouth, convinced that the glass covering would protect him. The task Leo had given me, to find that wretched powder, was exhausting me.
I was worn-out. I had looked in every nook and cranny, and it was time for me to go out. I reached Rosenthaler Strasse at noon, but couldn’t find Leo in Frau Falkenhorst’s café. It was almost always him who had to wait for me: this was his revenge.
I popped in and out of the café; many of the tables were filled with smokers. Leo had not come, and I guessed he would not appear now. I went to Alexanderplatz and roamed the station. I slid my hands along the cold verdigris tiles. My fingers ended up black with a soot I had no idea how to clean off.
I took the S-Bahn and dared venture as far as the stinking passageway outside the Ogre’s window. Leo might have been there, eager to catch fresh news on the radio. I had no idea what I was doing there on my own. I went closer to the window of the foulest-smelling man in Berlin, with his blaring radio set. I almost wanted to ask him: “Have you seen Leo, by any chance?” On the radio I heard there was a meeting of Ogres in the Hotel Adlon to decide what to do with the impure ones. They could have gone to the Hotel Kaiserhof, but no: they had to choose the Adlon, just to make our pain even more intense.
The Adlon was the symbol of a majestic Berlin. Everybody wanted to stay there. Now they were all fleeing. The Ogres’ flags were draped from every balcony at the hotel and from the streetlamps in the surrounding avenues where we once used to stroll happily.
But we were leaving. That was what was most important. Luckily, there was nothing I felt attached to. Not to our apartment, or the park, or my adventures with Leo in the neighborhoods of the impure people.
I was not German. I was not pure. I was nobody.
I had to find Leo, and so I decided to take a risk: I would catch the S-Bahn again and turn up at his house at 40 Grosse Hamburger Strasse. I repeated it to myself so as not to forget it. That was in the neighborhood Mama had refused to move to, where all the impure of Berlin now lived. Leo could have waited for me outside our apartment block. He was not afraid of anybody, much less of Frau Hofmeister.
I got off at Oranienburger Strasse. When I reached the intersection with Grosse Hamburger Strasse, I kept my eyes on the ground, and I bumped into a woman carrying a bag full of white asparagus. I apologized, and I heard the woman grumbling behind me, “What is a pure German girl doing on her own in a neighborhood like this?”
When I reached Leo’s street, I had to get my bearings. On the right was the cemetery and the so-called Free School for the impure. His house was on the left, toward Koppenplatz Park. I finally knew where I was.
The buildings were piled together in a charmless way in three- or four-story blocks that had identical façades, no balconies, all of them the same. Their mustard-colored walls were starting to fade because they had not been painted in years.
Here people walked about as if they had too much time on their hands. They were lost, disoriented. Two old men dressed in black stood in the entrance to one of the buildings. I could smell a sense of neglect and layers of sweat on jackets that were handed down without any real owner.
At least there was no smell of smoke, although there was still broken glass on the pavement. Nobody seemed to care: they trod on the shards and crushed them. The crunching sound ran down my spine.
In one shop, they had nailed up huge wooden boards to replace the windows smashed back in November. Someone had used black ink to make six-pointed stars on the wood, as well as phrases I refused to read.
I was looking for number 40; nothing else interested me. I did not want to know why the old men would not leave the doorway, or why a young boy, not yet four years old, was taking savage bites out of a raw potato and then spitting them out.
Number 40 was a three-story building painted a mustard yellow blackened by damp. The windows hung open as if they had lost their hinges. The front door, set to one side, had a smashed lock. As I climbed the narrow, dark staircase, the air inside was even
colder. It was like stepping into a filthy refrigerator that stank of rotten food. The stairwell was lit only by a feeble naked bulb. Some children rushed down the stairs and pushed past me. I clung to the banister so as not to fall, and felt something sticky on the palm of my hand. I walked along the corridor with no idea how to clean it off. The doors to several rooms were wide-open. I imagined that, at some time in the past, this had been a huge apartment belonging to a single family. Now it was packed with the impure who had lost their homes.
There was no sign of Leo or his father. The last door opened and a barefoot man came out wearing a stained undershirt. I walked on warily. The man had the same nose, like a poisonous mushroom, and the six-pointed star on his chest that I had seen on the cover of Der Giftpilz, the book we were forced to read at school. When he saw me, he stopped for a moment and scratched his head. He didn’t say a word, so I continued on my way, because I wasn’t afraid of him. Or of anybody.
I peeped inside one of the rooms, where they must have been boiling potatoes, onions, and meat in a tomato sauce. An old woman was rocking in a chair. Another disheveled woman was making hot tea. A little boy was staring at me as he picked his nose.
I understood now why Leo had not wanted me to see where he spent his nights. It had nothing to do with Frau Dubiecki, the landlady, being a dreadful crow. It was because of this sadness: Leo wanted to protect me from the horror.
You could have asked for help. You could have come and lived with us. I know it would have been dangerous, but we should have opened our doors to you, yet we didn’t. Forgive me, Leo.
I had reached the second floor, when someone grabbed my arm.
“You can’t be here.” The short woman with a huge belly thought I was not like them. That I was pure.
“I’m looking for the room where the Martin family lives,” I said in a feeble whisper, trying to hide the fact that I was really very afraid.
“Who?” she asked me scornfully.
“I need to talk to Leo. It’s urgent. A very serious family matter. I’m his cousin.”
The German Girl Page 9