The German Girl

by Armando Lucas Correa

  His boldness makes me laugh out loud again. Then I turn my back on him and am just stepping onto the porch when someone opens the front door. I hide behind Mom and clutch her hand. She squeezes mine tightly.

  As the rotting door opens, we can smell the perfume of violet water.

  “Welcome to Havana,” says a weak voice in English.

  It’s the little girl from the ship.

  I can’t see her face yet. From her voice, it’s hard to tell whether she is a young girl or an old woman. Aunt Hannah is standing inside the doorway as if she doesn’t want to be seen. She doesn’t come out to greet us but spreads her arms to invite us in.

  “Thank you for coming, Ida,” she says in a low voice, and then looks down at me and says with a smile, “How pretty you are, Anna!”

  I go in and hug her quickly, feeling shy. To me, she is still a shadow. Her hair looks the same way it does in the photos of her as a girl, parted on the side, with the ends curling inward and tucked behind her ears. Except that now she isn’t blonde and doesn’t have bangs. I begin to study her curiously. Mom lays a hand on my shoulder, as if to say “That’s enough!”

  In the semidarkness of the living room, my aunt looks as young as Mom. She is tall and slender, with a strong jaw and a long neck. As she emerges more into the light, wrinkles appear on a face that seems incredibly calm. I have the feeling I have known this woman for a long time.

  She is wearing a beige cotton blouse with pearl buttons, a long, narrow gray skirt, stockings, and low-heeled black shoes.

  Aunt Hannah speaks softly. She stresses the vowels and pronounces the consonants at the ends of words with great care.

  “Come on, Anna. This is your father’s house, and yours, too.”

  I hear her clear voice waver almost imperceptibly. Close up, I can see deep lines on her face, liver spots on veiny hands. Her blue eyes are striking, and her skin is so white it seems as if she has never been exposed to the fierce tropical sun.

  “Your father would have been so happy to see you now,” she sighs.

  She takes us down a hallway with checked tiles to the back of the house. The windows are covered by thick gray curtains.

  In the dining room, there’s a strong aroma of freshly made coffee. We sit at the table; its top is a cracked mirror covered in stains.

  Aunt Hannah excuses herself, goes into the kitchen, and returns with an old black woman who has difficulty walking. They serve themselves and my mother coffee, and offer me lemonade. The medium-built black woman comes over and gently holds my head against her stomach, which smells of cinnamon and vanilla.

  She says her name is Catalina. It’s hard to tell who helps whom, because they both appear to be about the same age. Hannah stands straight, but Catalina leans forward, due to her height. When she walks, she drags her feet, although I don’t know if this is just a habit or because she’s tired.

  “My girl, you’re just like your aunt!” she exclaims, rumpling my hair with a familiarity that surprises me.

  While Mom and Aunt Hannah talk about our journey, I look up at the ceiling. There are patches of damp everywhere. The paint on the walls is peeling, and the room is filled with the battered furniture of a family that must have lived well a long time ago.

  While Mom is busy telling her about our life in New York, Aunt Hannah doesn’t take her eyes off me. She asks if I’m bored, if it wouldn’t be a good idea to let me go out into the street so that the boy who talks so fast can take me to explore the city.

  “You can go out and play for a while if you like,” she insists.

  I’m not sure there’s anything around here for me to play with.

  “Better if you stay and get some rest,” says Mom. She pulls the envelope with the photographs out of her bag.

  This doesn’t seem like the right moment. We just got here. Perhaps it’s asking too much of Aunt Hannah to make her go back to such a distant past, but apparently Mom can’t think of anything more to say.

  I’d like to explore upstairs, where the bedrooms must be. I wish they’d leave me alone so I can see where Dad used to sleep, where he kept his toys and books.

  Mom lays out the photographs from Berlin on the cracked mirror tabletop. Hannah smiles, although I get the impression she would prefer to go on studying me than to have to return to the past.

  “Those were the happiest days of my life,” she says.

  As she remembers, her blue eyes grow more intense. She seems to be coming to life, although it’s obvious she is not particularly interested in that dramatic Atlantic crossing. I’m surprised to hear her say those were happy days.

  “I was your age, and was free to run all over the ship’s decks, sometimes until really late at night,” she explains. I don’t know what to say.

  She pauses for a long while between sentences.

  “My mother was so beautiful! And Papa was the most distinguished and respected man on board the St. Louis.”

  She picks up the photograph of a man in uniform and shows it to us.

  “Oh, and the captain . . . we adored him!”

  Mom points to a snapshot of a boy who appears both in the images from Berlin and those from the boat:

  “Who is this boy?”

  “Oh, that’s Leo!” Aunt Hannah falls silent for a moment. “We were very young.” Another silence, before she finally looks at us again. “He betrayed me, so I erased him from my life. But I think the time has come to forgive.” Another pause. “Will we be able to forgive someday?”

  We don’t know what to say. We were hoping she would tell us the story of the only person who posed naturally—the one who was obviously the main protagonist of the photo collection. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more about this Leo: if he had reached Cuba at a later date; how, exactly, he had betrayed her. But if I ask her, Mom will kill me. The silence deepens. Then Aunt Hannah picks up a postcard showing the boat in midocean.

  “Back then the St. Louis was the most luxurious transatlantic liner ever to reach Havana,” she recalls with a sigh. “It was our only hope, our salvation—or so we thought, Anna my dear, until we realized we were being tricked yet again. One man died during the crossing, and his body was thrown into the sea. Only twenty-eight of us were allowed to disembark. All the others were sent back to Europe, and less than three months later, war broke out. Nobody wanted us. We were the undesirables. But I was your age, Anna, and I couldn’t understand why.”

  Mom stands up and goes over to hug her. What I want is for the conversation to finish, to end the torture we’ve made this poor old woman suffer. We’ve only just arrived! And it’s obvious she thinks that the only cure for her illness is to forget. She seems more interested in learning about our lives in the present, because we are all that’s left of the boy who grew up to be a man in her house, only to disappear beneath the rubble of two tall towers in a far-off city she never knew.

  “Every day I wonder why I’m still alive!” she whispers, suddenly bursting into tears.

  Hannah

  1939

  The car hugged the coast, leaving the port behind. We could hear the St. Louis’s horn in the distance, but my mother did not even react. I turned to look through the back window of the car, and saw how we were moving apart. The boat was leaving the bay, while we were heading for the center of the city. I stopped crying. My father was nothing more than a dot in infinite space, lost again on the enormous liner where we had been a family for the last time.

  The lady sitting alongside the driver chose to talk to us just as I was drying my tears.

  “I’m Mrs. Samuels,” she explained. “We’re going to the Hotel Nacional. I hope it will only be for a couple of weeks, until the house in Vedado is furnished and ready. Mr. Rosenthal left everything well organized.”

  When I heard Papa’s name, a shiver ran down my spine. All I wanted to do was to erase the past, to forget, not to suffer anymore. We were safe on land, but my father and Leo were gone.

  “So this is the Cuban equivalent of the Hotel
Adlon?” asked the Goddess, raising an eyebrow ironically as we entered the Hotel Nacional.

  Fortunately, our room did not look out to sea but faced the city, so that we did not have to watch boats entering and leaving the harbor. In any case, the view hardly mattered, for during our entire two weeks’ stay in the hotel, Mama kept the curtains closed.

  “We have to protect ourselves from the sun and the dust,” she insisted.

  Whenever they came to straighten up the room, she would shout a stern “No!” if the maid tried to draw back the curtains. Each day it was someone different, and we never left before she arrived, just so that my mother could instruct her that she didn’t want a single ray of sunlight in there.

  Not once in those weeks did she mention Papa’s name. She met Mrs. Samuels every day on one of the terraces of the inside courtyard—the only place we were sheltered from an orchestra that, in her opinion, knew how to play only those fast-paced Cuban guarachas.

  “Island music,” she declared disdainfully.

  Sometimes she would ask the waiter if the musicians could please play less loudly or even if they could stop playing altogether.

  “Of course, Señora Alma.” The reply irritated her still further because the waiter used her first name, possibly because he couldn’t pronounce her German surname, whereas she, a foreigner, could speak perfect Spanish.

  Meanwhile, the guaracha music continued unabated.

  My mother decided to wear the same indigo-blue suit whenever she met Mrs. Samuels. When we returned to our room, she would send it to be cleaned and pressed. This was our routine in the Havana hotel to which she swore she would never return.

  In the morning, she would meet with our lawyer, Señor Dannón, who was handling the permits for our stay in Cuba. In the afternoon, she saw the representative of the Canadian bank where Papa had transferred most of our money, and who was in charge of our trust fund. After that, she would go to see the hotel manager, always with some complaint or other, usually about the orchestra and the noise that invaded the room even with the windows shut.

  I could tell she was happy the day our Cuban identity cards arrived. Not because we finally had the legal right to stay, and the right to reside in the house that until then she had refused to visit, but because she could, once and for all, be free of her ancestral name—thanks to Cuban bureaucracy or the ignorance of incompetent officials unable to spell Rosenthal. Now that our names had become more Spanish-sounding, she would be known as “Señora Rosen.” My first name was changed from Hannah to Ana, although I decided to tell everyone it should be pronounced with a J, like Jana.

  Mama never asked for her name to be corrected, although she insisted to her lawyer—a cigar smoker whose hair was thick with grease—that he should immediately try to get her a temporary American visa, because she had to be in New York within four months. He bewildered us with his talk of the decrees and legal resolutions passed by his government where the division of power between civil and military was precarious. When we were back in our room, Mama insisted to me—as if I hadn’t heard it already on board ship—that my sibling would be born in New York.

  At first, I continued to speak to her in German, just to see if she would keep the promise she had made to Papa, but she always replied in Spanish. I soon decided this ought to be the language we communicated in during our short stay on the island.

  She protested from morning to night, whether it was about the heat, the wrinkles we would get from the sun, or the Cubans’ lack of manners. They didn’t speak, they shouted. They were always late, used far too much cumin in their cooking and sugar in their desserts. The meat was always overcooked, and the drinking water tasted of rusty pipes. I realized that the more she detested everything around her, the busier she was, and so she forgot more quickly what had happened to the 906 passengers stranded on the St. Louis and did not have to speak of Papa. At that time, we had no idea what would happen to them: if they would find another island to take them in or be sent back to Germany.

  The day we finally descended to the lobby to meet the driver who was to take us to our house in Vedado, Señor Dannón told us that the St. Louis had docked at Antwerp, Belgium, and it had been agreed that the passengers would be taken in by Great Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium.

  “Señor Rosenthal has already taken a train to Paris.”

  Mother did not react. She refused to show any emotion in front of a stranger who no doubt was charging her more than he should have for his services. She glanced at a group of men entering the hotel wearing flimsy palm hats and shirts with pleats down the front and mother-of-pearl buttons. “The Cuban uniform,” she called it, considering it vulgar.

  Mrs. Samuels presented us to a driver in a black suit with gold buttonholes and a cap that made him look like a policeman. He had bulging eyes, and I found it impossible to tell how old he was: sometimes he looked very young; at others, he seemed older than Papa.

  “Good morning, señora. My name is Eulogio.”

  He removed his cap with his left hand, revealing a dark, shaven head. He extended his enormous, callused right hand first to Mama and then to me. I had never felt such a hot hand. He was the same man who a few days earlier had picked us up at the port, but we had not paid him much attention then. I found it hard to identify his accent: I didn’t know whether it was typically Cuban—swallowing parts of words and aspirating the s’s—or a foreigner who had come from another island or possibly Africa. Now our driver had a name, although we didn’t know yet what his family name was, and he was to accompany us throughout our stay in Cuba.

  We left the Hotel Nacional along Avenida O and then took Calle 23. The avenues all had letters, in ascending order as we progressed. I opened the car window to feel the hot breeze and hear the noise of the city. Then I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Papa on the train with Leo and Herr Martin arriving at the Gare du Nord Station in Paris. They would take a taxi to the Marais district and share a temporary apartment until our American visas were ready.

  I began to see not the streets of Havana but Parisian boulevards. I pictured Papa as in the books he had shown me: sitting at an outdoor café, reading his newspaper, and me running with Leo to one of the oldest squares in the French capital, the Place des Vosges, where Papa told me you could look up at the window of the room where Victor Hugo used to write.

  Then the car braked sharply, bringing me back to an island where I had no wish to stay. I passed the time counting the white stone markers identifying each street.

  We turned onto an avenue called Paseo, and then again into Calle 21. After we passed Avenida A, the car pulled to a stop a few yards before the next corner.

  Mother recognized the house as soon as she saw it. She pushed open the heavy iron gate, and we entered a garden full of yellow, red, and green croton bushes. At the far end was a small roofed-in porch. It was a solid two-story house that was quite modest in comparison with the mansion next door, which occupied a plot twice the size of ours. Señor Eulogio began to unload our suitcases, while I remained on the sidewalk, eager to explore the neighborhood we were going to live in for the next few months.

  Mother came to a halt on the threshold, waiting for the man with the darkest skin she had ever seen in her life to open the door for her. A stocky woman with graying hair appeared on the step. She was wearing a white blouse, black skirt, and blue apron.

  “Welcome,” she said in a gentle but firm voice. “I am Hortensia.”

  The entrance led straight into a square room with moldings on the walls and ceiling. A tiny palace in the middle of the Caribbean! The furniture was an imitation of classical French styles: armchairs with medallion backs, cabriole legs, and gilt edgings. When she saw them, the new Señora Rosen burst out laughing:

  “Where on earth have we come to? Hannah, welcome to the Petit Trianon!”

  A long passageway linked this room to the back of the house. At the far end was the dining room, filled with heavy pieces of furniture and a table with a mirror
top. A staircase led up to four spacious bedrooms on the second floor. There were gilt-framed mirrors everywhere and endless elaborate marquetry.

  My bedroom was above the porch, looking out onto the street. The furniture there was light green, with a small half-moon dressing table surrounded by mirrors, and a wardrobe with hand-painted flowers on it. I opened a door thinking it was a closet and found it was my bathroom. I had another surprise when I saw the floor tiles, which immediately took me back to Alexanderplatz Station: they were the same verdigris color as in the café where I used to meet Leo at midday.

  My mother’s bedroom was at the back of the house: the dark wood furniture there had clean, straight lines. Hortensia and I peered out of the window—which was to be kept shut from now on—looking across at the guesthouse above a garage that took up most of the yard.

  “That’s where I live,” said Hortensia. “Eulogio’s room is next door.”

  Mother was far from pleased at having people living on the property, but she said nothing. Eventually, she realized that it was probably better than having them in the house. Mrs. Samuels had insisted, “They are absolutely trustworthy.”

  On the ground floor was a study for my father; I was pleased we were still taking him into account. Next to the study, a small library woke Mother from the lethargy she had been plunged into by her first conversation with that small, plump woman who was to be our only companion for who knew how long. She went through titles and authors, rejecting most of them with her typical expressions: raising an eyebrow, chewing her lip, shaking her head, or rolling her eyes.

  “Cuban literature? I don’t want a single author from this island in here,” she said dismissively.

  I wasn’t sure Hortensia knew who these authors were, but she nodded anyway. Each time Mother passed by a window, she closed it, but she did allow the sun into the kitchen and dining room, calculating that this would be where Hortensia spent most of her time. And anyway, they did not open onto the street but onto the backyard.