The German Girl

by Armando Lucas Correa

  “What happened to Mr. Albert?” I ask.

  “We never heard from him again,” replies Aunt Hannah.

  Catalina bustles in and out of the dining room without paying much attention to Mom’s tears, my aunt’s sad smile, or even the story, which she must know by heart—all those dead people she never met. She has her own problems, and yet she always seems ready to help. Now she comes in with a pot of coffee.

  “This house needs lots of red and white roses,” she says, filling the tiny cups.

  In my memory, the scent of roses mingles with the aroma of the hot coffee Catalina prepares in a strict ritual. In Havana, people drink coffee all the time, to keep their eyes wide-open. My aunt takes a sip before continuing.

  “My mother had shed all the tears she had left by the time she heard they had arrested Papa. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t cry in front of anyone when his death was confirmed. After all the tears in Berlin, on the St. Louis, and in this dark house in Havana, she could only feel indignant at confirming that what had happened in Berlin was being repeated in Paris, and that Papa had been defeated by the horror of Auschwitz. Her pain was replaced by a cold serenity.”

  Aunt Hannah said that from that day on, the windows were never opened again in the house, or the curtains drawn back, or music played. Great-grandmother decided to live in darkness. She rarely spoke and ate only because she had to. She spent all the time shut in her bedroom, reading French literature in Spanish, translations that made those stories from earlier centuries seem even more remote. I find it hard to imagine what she must have been like.

  My aunt received a surprise when Great-grandmother had a family mausoleum built—not in the cemetery at Guanabacoa, which was the so-called Polack cemetery, but in the Colón Cemetery, the biggest in Cuba.

  “ ‘There’ll be room for us all here,’ she used to say whenever she went to supervise the building of the mausoleum,” recalls Aunt Hannah, imitating her mother’s firm tone of voice. “She did it less to honor the memory of her loved ones than for her body and mine to end up in Cuba, which she always blamed for not accepting us all when our boat arrived in the port of Havana.”

  Another silence. Catalina opens her eyes wide and shakes her head.

  “She made me promise her I would never leave Cuba,” Aunt Hannah says. “My bones were meant to rest alongside hers on this island she wanted to curse until her dying breath.

  “ ‘They’re going to pay for the next hundred years,’ she would insist.” She imitated Great-grandmother Alma once more, waving her hands dramatically in the air. Then she falls silent again.

  We stare at her in astonishment. Staying sane all those years must have been really difficult. She must have fled as far away as she could from the curse on her here.

  Catalina is busy with her chores, but when she hears what Alma intended to do, she shivers and runs her hand over her head as if to cleanse it of the evil that might still be in the house. She brings Aunt Hannah a glass of water to help clear her throat and allow all the sorrow choking her to come out. She runs her hand over her head, too, and mutters, “Let go of her! Get away! Godspeed, Alma!”

  Aunt Hannah trembles. There is an awkward silence as Catalina paces around the dining room. I decide to say something:

  “What happened to Leo?” I ask, although Mom looks at me as if to try to shut me up.

  “That’s another story,” replies Aunt Hannah, smiling again. Then she swallows hard.

  “After the war, I managed to get in touch with a brother of Leo’s mother in Canada. She had passed away shortly before Germany surrendered. That was a time of searching, of desperate attempts to find survivors, to reunite fragmented families. Nobody knew anything. Until one day I got a letter sent from Canada.”

  Lowering her head, she tucks her hair behind her ears and dries the perspiration on her brow with a napkin.

  “Leo and his father never left the St. Louis.”

  Hannah

  1950

  Mother had become a ghost, and Gustavo was increasingly elusive. Eulogio drove him to and from the Colegio de Belén Catholic School, but we never met any of his friends. From the time he was a toddler, Hortensia used to take him every weekend to her sister Esperanza’s house, because she had a son named Rafael. Despite their age difference, Gustavo had at least one friend to play with, although he wasn’t particularly happy about visiting a wooden shack that could be flattened by any hurricane, and where they talked constantly of the apocalypse and a god he couldn’t have cared less about.

  He gradually began to grow apart from us, and especially from Hortensia. He displayed all the vitality, lack of inhibition, and spontaneity that Cubans have. I suppose he was ashamed of Mother and me: two women who found it impossible to reveal their feelings in public and who were riddled with secrets. A couple of crazy women shut up in a house where there were never any newspapers, where they didn’t listen to the radio or television, or celebrate birthdays, Christmas, or the New Year. A house where the sun never shone.

  Gustavo was angry even at the way we spoke Spanish, which he found complicated and pretentious. We watched him come and go like a stranger, and often avoided speaking in front of him. Over family dinners, when Gustavo tried to talk politics, we would switch to topics he considered feminine and frivolous. His place at the table stayed vacant increasingly often.

  Hortensia insisted this was just typical adolescent rebelliousness, and she continued to try to spoil him as if he were her eternal baby. As far as he was concerned, though, Hortensia was now merely a household employee.

  It was thanks to Gustavo that guarachas, the sentimental music of Havana that drove my mother mad, soon infiltrated the house. He took the radio—which had not been switched on for years—up to his green-painted room and listened all day to Cuban music. Once, as I was passing his door, I saw him dancing on his own. He was swinging his hips, and then made a sudden dip, his feet crossing rapidly to the rhythm of that mindless music with its unfinished phrases and verses that were often no more than raucous shouts. Yet he was happy in his own way.

  I started studying at Havana University and decided I wanted to be a pharmacist. I didn’t want to have to depend anymore on the money Papa had deposited in an account in Canada, since we didn’t know how much longer we would have access to it. As I focused on my studies, Mother and Gustavo faded into the background. In addition, Leo’s betrayal, which I had learned of rather late, allowed me to think of him less frequently, and so my world was reduced to organic, inorganic, quantitative, and qualitative chemistry. Each day, I would climb the university steps, passing the bronze statue of the Alma Mater before entering the stately halls of the Faculty of Pharmacy. Only then did I feel secure.

  The mansion in Vedado receded for a few hours. My stain vanished, and no one called me a Polack anymore, at least not to my face. Once, one of my favorite professors, Señor Núñez, a small, bald man with two tufts of red hair behind his ears, came up to me and rested his hand on my shoulder as he checked my equations. The weight of his hand made me feel an inexplicable link. He was someone else like me! Maybe Núñez wasn’t his real name—maybe he had managed to come here with his family or as a child.

  Without understanding why, I started to tremble. I was so weary of stumbling over my ghosts! Professor Núñez realized this: perhaps he himself had been in a similar situation. He didn’t say a word, simply patted me on the back and went on reviewing the students’ work. But from then on, even when I didn’t really deserve it, he began to give me top marks.

  Each time I left classes and took a different way home, or got lost in the backstreets of the city, I would think of Leo. I could feel my small hand in his as he guided me along the streets of Berlin. Who knew why he had made the decision he had? In an unhappy time that made us all unhappy, we all saved ourselves as we thought best.

  It would have been better for me to have discovered his betrayal as soon as I arrived in Havana. As it was, I had to wait for many years to discover th
at Leo never got rid of those valuable capsules of ours—of the Rosenthals, not the Martins. He never threw them into the ocean, as he swore he had during our last dinner on board the St. Louis.

  So it was that for a long time I lived in the hope of meeting him again, of us creating the family we had dreamed of in those days when he drew maps on water in Berlin.

  Leo was not one of those who surrender. But the Leo who was left behind on the St. Louis was another person. The pain of loss transforms us.

  I would never know what really happened the day the St. Louis sailed off back toward Germany. I decided to think that Leo, proud at recovering the capsules, told his father he had them. Should he throw them in the sea? Impossible! He had succeeded in snatching them from the despairing Rosenthals. To have saved my life was much more important to him.

  Close to the Azores, more than halfway back to hell, when they saw they had been abandoned in midocean and without any hope that a country would take them in, perhaps Leo and his father took refuge in the only space where they felt safe: their small cabin that smelled of varnish. Then they lay down to sleep.

  Leo dreamed of me. He knew I was waiting for him, that I would wait for him with my little indigo box until he returned and placed on my finger the diamond ring that had been his mother’s and that his father had given him for me. We would go live by the sea, far from the Martins and the Rosenthals, from a past that had nothing to do with us. We would have lots of children, with no stains or bitterness. The best dream of all.

  At midnight, Herr Martin, watching over his only child’s deep, happy sleep, got up. He gazed down at the boy with those long eyelashes. How much he looks like his mother! he thought. This was the being he loved most in the world: his hope, his offspring, his future.

  He stroked Leo and lifted him in his arms as gently and slowly as possible, so as not to wake him. He felt his body, warm with life, beating against his chest. He didn’t think, he didn’t want to analyze what he was about to do. But he knew there was no other way. There are moments when we know the sentence passed is final. For Herr Martin, that moment had arrived.

  He took the treasure from his pocket: the little bronze container that, paradoxically, he himself had bought on the black market for Herr Rosenthal. He unscrewed it. Taking out a tiny glass capsule, he carefully placed it in the mouth of his son, still only twelve years old. With his first finger he pushed it toward the back, behind the molars, making sure the boy did not wake up.

  Leo gave a sigh, wriggled, and pressed himself closer against his father, searching for what only he could give him: protection. His father embraced him again. The last embrace, he thought. He put his lips up close to the cheek of the child who had such blind faith in him and who admired him so much.

  Herr Martin closed his eyes. He thought he could somehow absent himself from this moment, which it was already too late to avoid. He pressed his son’s delicate jaws together. He heard the small glass capsule crack, and the sound echoed deep inside his mind. The boy’s eyes opened, but his father did not have the courage to watch his son’s life ebb away. Leo’s breathing began to falter, he was choking, he couldn’t understand what was going on, or why the bitter, burning taste in his mouth was taking him from his father, from the man with whom he had set out to conquer the world.

  There were no tears, no complaints. No time for that. His open eyes, framed by their enormous lashes, stared at nothingness.

  Herr Martin raised the remaining capsules to his own mouth. This was the best way to make sure he did not survive this terrible tragedy. He did not dare weep or cry out: all he felt was a deep loathing for everything around him. He had taken his son’s life from him. Only a diabolical force could have driven him to commit such a dreadful atrocity. He had no wish to prolong the agony any longer. As the potassium cyanide mixed with his saliva, he could not even detect the taste or texture of the lethal powder. Instant brain death. A few seconds later, his heart stopped beating.

  They found the bodies of father and son the next day, when all the passengers had received permission to land outside Germany. A cable informed the captain that, for health reasons, it would not be possible to wait until they docked at Antwerp for their funeral. The boy with the longest eyelashes in the world was thrown overboard with his father, close to the Azores.

  This is how I preferred to imagine the end of my only friend, the boy who believed in me. My beloved Leo.

  Anna

  2014

  Aunt Hannah’s room is very plain. She has made an effort to erase every last trace of the past. That is why she sent us the negatives, the postcards from the boat, the copy of the German Girl with her photograph on the front cover. She doesn’t want to keep anything.

  “It’s enough having it up here,” she says, touching her temple. “I wish I could get rid of it there, too.”

  She can close her eyes and find her way around the big room overlooking the street without bumping into the dresser, the bed, the night table, the rocking chair, the stand for her hats and shawls. In her mind’s eye, she can see every inch of this space she once thought would be only temporary. The young girl’s bedroom is now that of an old woman.

  There aren’t any photos on the walls, furniture, or shelves. She doesn’t have any books, either. I thought I would find her room covered with photographs from her childhood in Berlin, her ancestors. We’re very different. I spend my life plastering my bedroom walls with pictures, and she gets rid of them.

  Sometimes I think she never had a childhood, that the Hannah in the photos from Berlin and on the magazine cover is another girl who died during the crossing.

  On the chest of drawers, there is a white china pot decorated in blue.

  “It’s from my pharmacy, but I lost that. Back then they took everything from you in this unpredictable country,” she says without explaining.

  She doesn’t keep the pot out of nostalgia for the Farmacia Rosen, which used to be on a street corner in Vedado, but as somewhere to put anything she doesn’t want covered by the constant tropical dust.

  In the wardrobe with a door that sticks constantly, I see the collection of soft white cotton blouses and dark skirts made of some heavy material that became the uniform she used in her later years in Havana.

  She opens her night table drawer and shows me a little blue box.

  “This is the only thing I’ve kept from my three weeks on board the St. Louis. It will soon be time for me to fulfill my promise. It won’t be long now before I open it.”

  I wonder how she could keep the box for so long without wanting to know what was inside it. She already knew Leo wasn’t coming back and that she had lost him forever.

  She also shows me the Leica her father gave her before they boarded the St. Louis.

  “Take it, Anna,” she tells me. “It’s yours. It’s been put away ever since we arrived in Havana, so perhaps it still works.”

  Before she shuts the drawer, I catch sight of the back of a photograph that has something written on it. I manage to read: “New York, August 10, 1963.”

  Seeing my interest, she picks up the photo and stares at it for a long time. It shows a man in an overcoat at an entrance to Central Park.

  “That’s Julian, with a J,” she says, smiling.

  I had never heard that name before, so I wait for her to explain. From the way she is gazing at it, and also because it wasn’t in the envelope that reached us in New York, I guess he can’t be from our family.

  “We met when we were both studying at university in Havana. It was a very chaotic time.”

  She continues to stare at the black-and-white photograph, which is blurred and creased slightly.

  “We didn’t see each other for some years, because he had gone to study in New York. Then he came back, and we met again at my pharmacy. We were inseparable, but then he left again. Everybody leaves here, except for us!”

  When I ask if he was her boyfriend, she laughs out loud. Then she returns the photograph to the drawer, struggle
s to her feet, and goes out onto the landing.

  Between her room and ours, there are two locked rooms. Aunt Hannah realizes that even though I can’t bring myself to ask her, I am studying the doors with great curiosity.

  “That was Gustavo’s room! It was our fault we created such a monster! I didn’t have the nerve to put your father in there when he came here to live with us as a child. In those years, your father was our only hope. Now you are.”

  I hold on to the banister behind Aunt Hannah, who carefully places her foot on each step as we go downstairs. Not because she is afraid of falling, but to maintain her upright posture. I touch the walls with my hand, trying to imagine Dad on these stairs at my age, following the aunt who saved him from growing up alongside a “monster.” His parents had been killed in an airplane accident and his grandmother was prostrate in bed, and it was his aunt who devoted herself to looking after him. He grew up protected by this small fortress in Vedado. He was to be the only one who left the island where the Rosenthals had made a vow to die.

  Aunt Hannah seems to have come to the end of her explanations. But ever since she said that word monster to describe Gustavo, she knows I’m curious. There’s a big gap between the years when Gustavo was a student and the airplane accident. But I’ll get another chance; there’s a time for everything.

  We stand together in the front doorway. We stare for a few moments at the garden, where, she tells me, there were once poinsettias, bougainvilleas, and multicolored croton bushes.

  “Everything here dries out. And I so much wanted to grow tulips. My father and I loved them.”

  For the first time, I sense a deep nostalgia in her voice. My aunt’s eyes seem to be brimming with tears that never fall but well up and make them seem an even brighter blue.

  I leave her with Mom, because Diego is waiting to take me to discover another secret part of the city. When I meet him, he says something awkward, as usual:

  “I think your aunt must be at least a hundred!”