Seal Woman

by Solveig Eggerz

  "Say one."

  "Esterka," he said languidly, waking up now, reaching for her breasts.

  She pushed his hand away.

  "Not that old name."

  His hands went to her waist. "Esterka. Esterka. Esterka," he said in a teasing voice, stroking her belly.

  "That's not my name."

  He rolled over on his back, puzzled now. "Big Piroschka said that when she found you, you called yourself Monika."

  "No, not that."

  Angry tears welled up. She'd seen those two people again in a dream, talking and talking. One of them must be her mother. What had she called her? The name had hovered at the edge of her consciousness, but she lost it before she woke up.

  "You're crazy," Erik said, turning his back to her.

  But she wouldn't let him go. It wasn't that easy. Maybe she was crazy, but there was more. That damned dollhouse had started everything roiling in her. She buried her face in his back and sobbed. He turned to her and embraced her.

  "Who am I?" she whispered into his chest.

  "My very own Mrs. Kasmierski," he said proudly.

  Her heart sank, but she let him rock her to sleep.

  The next day it snowed, and Esterka stayed indoors while Erik went to the fur shop. Little Piroschka had played with the dollhouse all morning; suddenly she appeared in the kitchen.

  "Mamma, I'd like a bear," she said.

  "Maybe Papa can find one in Krakau."

  "Not a new bear. I want the bear that's in your room."

  "It's a dirty old thing," Esterka said. Besides, it wasn't a toy any more, she thought. It was a traveling companion, a survivor.

  The child looked sad. Esterka hated to disappoint her, so she went to her bedroom and took the bear from the chest of drawers and wiped it with a wet cloth until it began to come apart at the seams. The foot pads were wearing away, and the feet were leaking their straw stuffing. She'd have to sew it up tomorrow. Then she noticed the corner of a cloth buried in the bear's foot. She pulled on it until it came out. Straw fell on the floor. She smoothed out the cloth. Stitched into the cotton were three words and a date:

  Lena Bernstein, born 1936.

  Her face grew hot. That was the name. In her dream she'd almost found it, but then it had fallen back into the darkness of her memory. Esterka put the cloth into her pocket.

  Absentmindedly, she gave Little Piroschka the bear, and the child opened her arms and hugged the torn creature. She went down for her nap, holding the bear. In the kitchen Esterka sliced cheese and salami, but then she stopped. She wasn't hungry. She took the cloth from her pocket and held it up to the window, read it again against the snow.

  When her foster mother arrived to babysit, Esterka put on her fur hat and coat, picked up her shopping bag, and set out in the snow. She kept one hand bare and in her pocket, so she could finger the embroidered letters on the cloth. Lena Bernstein.

  The cold air stung her face, and the sky above appeared swollen with more snow. But inside her, something warm washed over the hard place where she stored the imagined memories of her mother—She knew she'd sat under a table pretending to be a Chinese princess. The woman who had abandoned her was talking, talking. But one day she'd stuffed the cloth into the bear. Why?

  Numb with cold, Esterka walked to the edge of the village, where the farms and the smell of animals began. It was snowing again.

  Walking home, she thought how her foster mother had saved her life, but also how she'd missed living the life meant for Lena Bernstein. She'd been Monika and then Esterka and hardly Lena at all. She'd never used the word for her foster mother. Mamma.

  During the next weeks, she practiced her new identity in the bathroom with the door closed. She looked in the mirror and addressed herself as Lena Bernstein.

  At last, she showed the cloth to her foster mother. A startled look crossed her foster mother's face. "Doesn't mean a thing," Piroschka said.

  But it was too late. Lena already knew who she was. She met her foster mother's gaze.

  "I'm going to the place for lost people."

  "But you're not lost."

  The words I found you hung on the air between them, but Lena Bernstein was already halfway out the door.

  ***

  At the Polish Red Cross, a little man with spectacles at the end of his nose looked at her with kind eyes.

  "I'm probably a German Jew. My mother hid me somewhere eighteen or twenty years ago."

  He looked interested. But it occurred to Lena that her search might end nowhere.

  "Do you have any idea where she hid you?" he asked.

  It was a stupid question, but he spoke in a gentle way, unlocking something in her. She was back on the train with her mother, leaning against her bosom, breathing in the rose fragrance of her soap. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  "No."

  "Then go to the Berlin Red Cross."

  She nodded solemnly.

  "Did you say you're Jewish?"

  "I didn't say."

  But she showed him the cloth.

  "Name could be Berlin Jewish," he said.

  The next day she took the train to Berlin. Farms and woodland rushed by the window. She'd missed the view on the way to Poland years ago. The thought chilled her. Why was she doing this? Traveling in the wrong direction? Back to Germany? She could have taken the train to Krakau instead, spent the day downtown, shopping.

  In Berlin, she found the address the Polish Red Cross had given her. She entered a large lobby. On the walls hung photos, some curled at the edges. When she approached the counter asking for help in Polish, the clerk gestured to a woman with short black hair and matching eyebrows.

  Lena took the cloth from her pocket and showed it to the woman. The woman glanced at it and raised her eyebrows. She disappeared into the back room, returned with a sheet of paper and a photo, gestured for Lena to sit down at a table. The photo was of a girl of about five with curly hair. She resembled little Piroschka. Lena glanced at the paper and read her new name there.

  The woman explained that an older woman had come looking for a granddaughter named Lena, that the woman's daughter, Lena's mother, was living in another country, that she'd never come back to Germany. She'd left just after the war.

  Lena's heart sank. Not only had her mother abandoned Lena, but she'd left the country so she could forget all about her. Lena felt like getting back on the train. But the clerk was smiling now, handing her some German coins, writing down an address and directions for the bus to Wilmersdorfer Straße.

  Outside again, Lena felt dizzy and confused. A gloomy winter darkness had crept into the weak daylight. She boarded a bus, and held her stomach as the vehicle rumbled through the city streets. By the time they got to the designated neighborhood, she was the last person on the bus.

  The driver stopped. Lena got up from her seat and showed him the address. He pointed out the window.

  Left, then right, then right again.

  She found it difficult to follow his directions. Her head spun with the complexity of traveling back in time to visit people who hadn't wanted her. Piroschka's words wrapped themselves around her heart.

  People who had children with Jews abandoned them in convents. You're better off staying in Poland with me.

  This country gave her a choking feeling. A woman carrying groceries walked by. She was probably one of those who'd watched from the window when they hauled away the Jews next door. Like her mother had done.

  She longed to be at home again. Little Piroschka would be asking for a story.

  Where's Mamma?

  She'd never leave the child.

  The driver tapped the steering wheel. He smiled, gestured with his hand to the door. Lena got off the bus. She began walking, turning down streets. She looked up at the numbers on the buildings, tried to recall the driver's instructions.

  At last she stood in front of a brick building. Her heart pounding, she pulled open the door and entered a dark stairwell. If this was reall
y her grandmother's building, it should look familiar.

  But it felt like she'd never been here before. Second floor, first door on the left. She climbed the steps and stopped in front of a large wooden door. Wouldn't she remember a big door like that? A big brass knocker? Was she at the wrong building? But she'd followed the directions precisely, read the house numbers carefully.

  Her ear against the door, she listened. For what? The sound of her grandmother's voice? But there was no sound, not even a radio.

  An old man walked down the hall. He stared at her. She raised the brass knocker and rapped hard on the door. The man disappeared down the stairs. Then she waited, listened hard to the silence. She banged on the door with both fists. Nothing. Tears welled in her eyes. She'd come all this way, and nobody was home.

  Back at the Red Cross office, she told the Polish-speaking woman what had happened.

  "She must've gone out shopping," the woman said gently.

  "It was the wrong address," Lena said.

  The clerk shook her head. "Please leave your address with us."

  Lena wrote her Polish address in block letters. She pushed the paper over the counter toward the clerk. Without another word, she walked out the door and hurried to the train station. She found a seat next to the window, kept her eyes closed until the train was well out of the station. As the train rolled over the tracks, she gradually began to breathe evenly.

  With Berlin behind her, she felt somehow relieved.

  The lights from the city of Krakau glittered through the raindrops on the window. Her heart beat with anticipation as if she'd been away for years, as if she'd nearly lost everything. At last, the train pulled into the village station. At home, she turned the key and pushed the door in. Piroschka sat asleep on a chair. Little Piroschka must have gone to bed hours ago.

  Her foster mother opened her eyes. Lena saw the searching look.

  "It was a mistake," Lena said quickly. Gratification crossed Piroschka's face like a skulking goblin.

  Lena went to little Piroschka's room, touched the child's foot. The little girl opened her eyes, sat up, let her mother hug her. Lena told her the story of the old Russian couple who always slept on top of the oven. They refused to leave their village even when their son sent money from America because they never wanted anything more from life but the warmth of their very own stove in the night.

  Little Piroschka was breathing soundly again before the story was done. Lena noticed the bear lying on the floor next to the bed. She picked it up and cradled it in her arms.

  In the kitchen, her foster mother was taking off her bathrobe, preparing for bed. Piroschka turned and gazed at Lena with an adoration that both consoled and irritated her. She rolled the word over her tongue without speaking it. Mamma. It would always be a label for the mystery woman who lived in her imagination. She kissed Piroschka, then watched her shuffle toward the bed she'd made for herself on the sofa.

  Erik did not stir when she got into bed next to him. She brought her knees to her chest, cuddled the bear the way she used to, burying her nose in the thin fur on the bear's head. Breathing in the dusty smell from long ago, she tried to remember a time before Poland. But her memory would not travel beyond the root cellar.

  Tiny Crow's Feet

  That spring Charlotte wore the old blue cardigan that her mother had knitted. When it wore out at the elbows, she hadn't bothered to darn the holes, just pushed it under her things at the bottom of the drawer. But it had pockets—the kind you used for a hanky on runny nose days. In the right pocket was the telegram from her mother. Now she moved her elbow against the pocket, heard the reassuring sound of paper crackling.

  Ragnar had brought it back from the village. She'd met him at the door, carried it in both hands into the shed. Under the flickering oil lamp, her feet firmly planted on the dirt floor, she'd told herself that whatever the telegram said didn't matter. What happened beyond the horizon was not her concern. Her roots lay in the earth at Dark Castle—shallow like the Alpine Azalea's—but firm enough to nourish a flower. She envisioned an arc of tomorrows, time measured in units of sheep-shearing, haying, and sheep slaughter. Bored with the pattern, she also feared its disruption.

  She ripped open the envelope.

  They called me from the Red Cross. A young Polish woman had contacted them. They said she had a cloth with the name Lena Bernstein on it. They gave her my address. She came looking for me, but I wasn't here. She left an address, lives somewhere near Krakau. Do you know about this cloth?

  Charlotte's heart rolled against her ribs. She walked toward the house, tripping over the familiar stones in the driveway. Back in the house, she entered her bedroom and closed the door. She sat down on the edge of the bed. The cloth. She recalled how she'd sewn the letters into the cloth and pushed it into the bear's foot. Why? If somebody found it—

  Now the bear was in Poland. Maybe with Lena. But Poland was a big country, big enough to obscure a young woman's whim. Her mother would keep looking, but Poland was full of people. Her mother would bump into the wrong ones and miss the slender young woman who looked like Max. Charlotte reined in her joy, thought hard on the lesson she'd set for herself—here not there.

  She rose to her feet and stood sideways at the window so that she could glimpse the ocean. In the distance she could see the glacier. Deep inside the earth, below the ice, throbbed the fire. Air. She needed air. In the hall, she found her windbreaker. Out on the steps, the wind whipped her hair across her face. Flopping her hood over her head, she pulled on the twine at the neck and tied it in a bow. Hands in her pockets, she walked until she grew warm inside the windbreaker. Just beyond the home field, a small herd of sheep faced the wind, their coats flat against their bodies. The grass flew straight back at the same angle. At the gate that separated the home field from the meadow, the wind flattened her windbreaker against her chest. The old woman looked up from picking angelica at the edge of the field. Charlotte waved to her and pointed to some fence posts, pretended to be looking for broken ones. She lifted the hemp noose from the post. Built of the few wood scraps they could spare from maintaining the shed, the rickety gate shuddered in the wind as she slipped out.

  She avoided the turn that led to the village and the shore. Instead, she walked straight until the road curved around a cluster of rocks. The wind shifted slightly, carrying her forward towards the wooden platform where Ragnar placed their canisters of milk for dairy pick-up. It was also the bus stop, where she'd begun this strange life so many years ago.

  The oxygen in her lungs helped Charlotte imagine her fiveyear old baby, the one she'd lunged after in the ocean. But somewhere on a Warsaw street, a Polish shop girl teetered on ridiculously high heels. Later Charlotte could weep over the loss of Baby Lena. One day she would. Now she must sniff the air for her grown daughter. If only she could paint Lena, wrap her in color the way Egill had swathed his son in words.

  ***

  Later that week she finally began to paint. But Ragnar and his brother, not Lena, were her subjects. She held the brush loosely as if the boys would flow into reality through her fingers. Gunnar, a boy whom she'd never seen, assembled himself first. Her brush created his strong shoulders, his thick legs, his eyes lively with a love of mortal danger. Painting Ragnar as a boy took a longer time. Surrounded by photos provided by the old woman, Charlotte kept changing his face, his hands. It had to be just right. Nobody must mistake Gunnar and Ragnar for her own two sons.

  At last the painting hung on the wall. Often she caught Ragnar looking at it. Once she found him tracing with his fingertip the log that bound the boys, from shoulder to shoulder, a bond for one short moment in eternity. She stood behind him and said nothing. He turned around slowly and gazed into her eyes.

  "When will you paint Lena?"

  And finally she began. But she kept starting over again. That fall during the round-up of the sheep, the slaughter of the lambs, the stirring of the blood sausage, Charlotte did what she had to do and then washed her hands
and went to her canvas.

  During the dark days of winter, she broke into the Christmas candle supply and studied the canvas in candlelight. The bright light of noon sometimes obscured what she was trying to see. The more she painted, the more she saw. And whatever she saw, she strove to give back to the canvas.

  At Christmas, they made a bonfire in the snow and danced around it singing Adam had seven sons. Seven sons had Adam. Laughing at the boys' antics, Charlotte was completely happy. Yet, in the flames, she saw what her oil paints had tried to create, a young woman with a long waist and a graceful neck. She wore white and tossed her hair.

  Catch me if you can.

  And now when her mother wrote about the deadly cold that gripped the continent, Charlotte worried. Did Lena own a coat?