by Steven Uhly
Questions, answers, more questions, more answers, a degree of uncertainty in every detail, a perhaps. But they were well acquainted with this, it is where they came from: perhaps we’ll live, perhaps we’ll die. Nothing can stop us any longer, Mr. Abramowicz said. Nothing, cried Emil, the soldier, Nothing at all, the old man bellowed.
They sang the song of hope, their voices resounded out into the lake, drifted to Villa Minoux, and even Anna Sarfati, who was listening more than singing, sensed the truth of these words. That evening, when the others had gone back to the camp at Schlachtensee,
You must come and visit us!
It really is like a shtetl!
In the middle of Zehlendorf!
And it’s big too!
It’s even got its own college!
You could learn Hebrew there!
And a synagogue!
And a theater!
And its own newspaper!
Peretz, arrange it so your wife can be with us!
There’s nothing here!
Give me a hug!
Shalom Chaverim! That evening, when Anna was lying in her bed, on the bottom bunk, with an exhausted Shimon who snored as he slept, his head pressed into her armpit, the song went through her head again, she felt her way through it again to feel the reluctance, Why should I be filled with hope when I had to abandon it to stay alive? And yet it’s true. For as long as a Jewish soul resides in the heart and turns an eye to the east, forward, to Zion, our hope is not forlorn, the ancient hope of returning to the land of our fathers, to the city where David set up his camp.
Then she fell asleep.
47
The new Lisa had a false name. One Tuesday morning in autumn she went with her false grandmother to the authorities to make the truth official. They entered room 305 on the first floor, where an elderly man eyed them skeptically across his desk. On the desk stood a sign which read: Reinhard Müller, Adviser. Behind him was a wall of shelves full of black files from floor to ceiling.
After Lisa had told the man her name and Frau Kramer explained the reason for their visit, Reinhard Müller got up and scanned the shelves for a while before pulling out a fat folder. Dropping it onto his desk, he sat back down and leafed through the folder. Suddenly he paused and mumbled, “Oh yes, here it is: Lisa Kramer, née Kramer, mother: Maria Kramer . . .” He raised his head and looked at Frau Kramer.
“Are you the grandmother?” Frau Kramer hesitated, then nodded. Reinhard Müller turned to Lisa.
“So you wish to change your name?” he said.
Lisa nodded.
“And you’re happy with that?”
Frau Kramer nodded.
Müller leafed through the file again. “Why didn’t her mother come along?”
“She’s working,” Frau Kramer said, and that was not even stretching the truth.
“I see. You do know that your granddaughter has limited legal capacity over her own affairs, don’t you?”
“She’s not of legal age, if that’s what you mean.”
“Exactly. You need the mother’s authority, you see.” The two women exchanged glances, but said nothing. Herr Müller sighed.
“Changing one’s name is not that simple.”
“Why not?” Frau Kramer asked.
Herr Müller rocked his head from side to side.
“First you have to prove that there’s a compelling reason for the change of name.”
“She’s not my granddaughter, she’s the daughter of Margarita Ejzenstain, I can prove it.” She faltered. The truth, hidden for so long, slotted into one sentence.
“I fear that’s not enough,” Herr Müller said. “I mean, anyone could turn up here and claim whatever they liked. Can you imagine all the extra administrative work that would cause? In any case,” he said, pausing to look at Lisa, “Kramer’s a good name. Or do you really want everyone to know at once that you’re a Jew?” Before Lisa or Frau Kramer could react, Herr Müller raised his hands defensively.
“Don’t get me wrong, ladies. I’ve got nothing against Jews personally, I mean, they’re just people too. But in Germany it’s a little complicated. You see, the law on changing one’s name came into force in 1938.” He stopped talking, looked at both women, gave a theatrical nod of the head and pushed up his top lip with the bottom one as if everything had now been said.
“Should I lie?” Lisa said helplessly, returning his gaze.
“We ought to leave all that behind us,” Frau Kramer said with determination. “My granddaughter . . .” she said, faltering again. “Lisa Ejzenstain would like to use her real name at last. Surely you understand that.”
Herr Müller gave a conciliatory nod and said, “Of course I do, of course. But for your part you have to understand that every change of name hinders the traceability of a person’s family origins, makes it easier for someone to obscure their personal details and conceals their racial heritage. This is why people can only change their names when there are important grounds, such as your proving your granddaughter’s Jewish ancestry. I’m sorry.”
Staring at Herr Müller, Lisa said, “The reverse of everything you’ve just said is true in my case: my current surname hinders, obscures and conceals.”
Lübeck’s officer responsible for name changes, in a sub-department of the registry office, temporarily housed in the city hall, first floor, room 305, shrugged his shoulders and assumed an apologetic expression. Then he smiled jovially and said, “Chin up, there are worse things in life!”
For Reinhard Müller the conversation was at an end. The two women stood up, Goodbye, and while he watched them open the door, leave through it, and close it behind them, he pondered how some things could be turned on their head without anything really changing. In the past Jews had come to him to assume Aryan names, and he had given them the same answer that he had to this Jewish girl, who now wanted to break her cover, goodness knows why.
He got up, walked around his desk, put one foot into the corridor and called in the next person waiting.
When the two women had left the city hall and were making their way home through the streets of the old town, Frau Kramer said to her granddaughter, “We need to talk to Maria.”
They went into Frau Kramer’s apartment, sat at the round table, Frau Kramer made some tea, and then they chatted about other things, Lisa spoke about school life at the Katharineum, she said, Did you know that Erich Mühsam was a former pupil and was kicked out? Frau Kramer had no idea who Erich Mühsam was, Later on the Nazis murdered him because he was Jewish, Lisa said, oblivious to her grandmother’s anxiety, she said, I’m much more focused on anything Jewish now, she laughed and said, Grandma, surely you know that our school fair always takes place in Israelsdorf. And when her grandmother nodded, she continued, The Nazis thought it had something to do with Jews and so renamed the area Walddorf—how stupid is that? She laughed and her grandmother nodded, Yes, it’s really stupid. And it hurt, but she did not say this.
Maria came home late that afternoon. She looked shattered, she reeked of strong perfume, her face indicated that she wanted to be left in peace. Without saying hello or even acknowledging her mother and Lisa she tossed her coat and handbag onto the living room carpet, slipped out of her high-heeled shoes, took off her dress, knickers, bra, and when she was completely naked, allowing Lisa and Frau Kramer to see the blue patches on her upper thighs and arms, and the weary skin around her buttocks and breasts, she went and locked herself in the bathroom.
She emerged just as naked an hour later. When she noticed the two women still drinking tea at the round table by the window which looked onto the street, she put her hands on her hips and said in a loud, coarse voice, “What are you two gawking at? Have you got a problem?” Frau Kramer was about to reply, but Lisa got in first.
“I need your help, Maria.” The other woman gave her a baffled look, before laughing.
“Don’t count on getting anything from me, sweetie!” she said gruffly. But she stayed where she was.
; “I need to prove that my name’s not Kramer,” Lisa said. “And you’re the only one besides my mother who can testify to that. Officially, you are my mother.”
“What? Me?” Maria laughed out loud. Grabbing her breasts, she pushed them up and cried, “All manner of people’s lips have sucked at these, but you were not one of them.” Maria let her arms fall by her sides, she was thinking. “What do I need to do?” she said.
“You have to declare under oath that you’re not Lisa’s mother,” Frau Kramer said, “and that Lisa was not born a Kramer.”
Maria lowered her gaze, then raised her head and said, “Why do you want that? Aren’t we good enough for you anymore?”
Lisa stared at the naked woman. She had not been expecting an answer like that. There was so much that she wanted to say all at once, that she could not utter a single word. Frau Kramer came to her assistance.
“She just wants to take the name of her biological mother, surely you can understand that, Maria?”
“The name of her biological mother,” Maria said, aping her mother. “As if that were something so special. What is it, anyway?”
“Ejzenstain,” Lisa said in a reedy voice.
“You’re telling me you want to swan around with a Jewish name? No way! What will people think?”
“That’s none of your business!” Frau Kramer said.
“I’m off,” Lisa said tersely. Frau Kramer looked at her granddaughter in dismay, but Lisa did not notice. “Please, Maria!” she said. “I can’t go around with the wrong name anymore.” Maria shrugged and glared at her mother. Then she turned around to pick up her clothes.
“I don’t care. And I’m not going to help you.”
With these words she withdrew to her bedroom, the same room in which Lisa had been living for the past two months, but one floor higher, in Tobias Weiss’s apartment.
Frau Kramer put her head in her hands.
“How has she ended up like that?” she said, sobbing. Lisa sat opposite her grandmother, for a moment she lacked the instinct to comfort her, and all of a sudden she had very different thoughts from before. All of a sudden she thought, What did you do wrong, you and Wilhelm, for her to turn out like this? Slowly she got up and left the apartment.
48
When Otto Kruse saw the woman as she got off the bus he followed her. He did not know for certain why he did it, but the woman’s face, her tall, slender physique, her delicate neck, her elegant movements, all these things stirred something inside him which he had not experienced since . . . He knew exactly when, but did not spend a moment thinking about it. Otto Kruse had drawn a line which went right through his life. There was a man in front of the line and a man behind it. The man in front of it was he, Otto Kruse, who had seen a woman who interested him and who he was now following, literally a primeval act, the man picks up the scent and follows the woman, the elemental force of nature was hidden in this harmless scene, the city that became a set, the other people who were reduced to extras, for what was really happening was so ancient and so essential that Kruse could mull this over as much as he liked while he pursued the woman through the old town in Munich—but each time it boiled down to the same thing: despite all civilization, man was a creature of instinct, predetermined by his biological makeup, which you could exalt or romanticize, but which could not change the simple truth that he wanted to have this woman.
Otto Kruse drove his thoughts on ahead like a bow wave, they banked up before him, letting him forget the fear he felt as he watched the woman enter an optician’s on Kauflingerstrasse. He waited outside, it was spring, he had a new identity, an interesting career, a beautiful period apartment in the city center, he had money in his pocket and he weighed now as much as he had before being taken prisoner. Life was good.
But now he stood in the middle of the shopping street, cars drove past him, people streamed along the pavement like water and he felt as heavy as a rock. If he could just help himself to her. But those days were over. He needed a different approach to make his plan succeed. He needed a different mode of attack.
When the woman came back out she walked straight toward Otto Kruse, or at least that is how it seemed to him. Like a non-swimmer who dares to plunge into cold water he stood in her way and said something for her ears only. She gave him a startled look, she almost laughed, but for some arcane reason, which Otto Kruse would describe with terms such as instinct, chemistry and smell, she was precisely that type of woman who could only be conquered in an unpleasant, direct, even brutal way. Her name was Emma Huber. She was nineteen years younger than Otto Kruse. Her mother owned the optician’s, which the family had acquired cheaply at the beginning of the 1940s. Her father had been drafted into the territorial army toward the end of the war and went missing in Romania, Emma was still a girl at the time. Since then she had helped her mother in the shop until recently she had stopped to train to be an optician herself, aiming one day to take over the practice. Emma was an only child.
A few months after she met Otto Kruse, Emma moved out of her family home and into his attractive, large, period apartment. To her, Otto Kruse seemed like a mysterious king, sometimes she would gaze at his Indian’s face with its majestic aquiline nose and imagine that somewhere he had a secret realm to which he would one day carry her off. The fact that he was merely a manager in an insurance firm, which is what he had told her, seemed unimportant. She was utterly convinced that in a higher reality he enjoyed a very different status.
When Emma missed a period, Otto Kruse told her that it was time they were wed. Emma said, Yes, without being asked. They married at the registry office and, to please her religious mother, in the Church of St. Peter on Rindmarkt, which had been rebuilt four years previously, in the very center of Munich’s old town and only a couple of minutes from the optician’s. Nine months later Heinrich Kruse was born. It was a five-hour labor and an uncomplicated birth. The doctors were amazed that the baby was able to hold up its head on its own immediately after being born and went straight for his mother’s breast.
In all that time Otto Kruse did not miss a single day of work. In the morning he would drive south from Munich in his company car, a black Mercedes 190, to his interesting job in the former Rudolf Hess Estate in the neighboring municipality, and would return in the evenings to where his wife and child were waiting for him. In his spare time he liked listening to American big band music. He regularly went to exhibitions with his small family. With his penchant for antique furniture he gradually acquired a Biedermeier and Art Deco ensemble, a collection of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscapes, as well as an attractive Arcimboldo copy: “The Vegetable Gardener.” Depending on which way up you looked at it, the painting showed a bowlful of vegetables or the face of a man wearing a helmet. There were hooks at both top and bottom, so Otto Kruse would occasionally rehang the picture the other way up, delighted by the effect.
Another work of art, to which Otto Kruse was so attached that he placed it between the two large windows in the living room, was an ash-wood sculpture, the stylized representation of a tree that divided at the crown, the boughs coiling up ornately on either side like snails. Sometimes, when no one was looking, Otto Kruse would stand before it and think of distant things that lay somewhere inside him like sunken leaves at the bottom of a lake, churned up occasionally by movements of unknown origin and briefly brought back to just beneath the surface, before sinking to the bottom again.
At unexpected moments, such as when he was on his way to work or sitting on the sofa reading Der Spiegel, he would recall the feeling of having the definitive say over other people’s lives. From time to time images of another woman would flit through his head, a woman breathing heavily beneath him, she was very close, very hot, internally and externally, entirely defenseless and acquiescent, entirely his. Then he would withdraw to the lavatory to feel again these images, the heat, the closeness, the power. He regarded such moments as a perfectly natural means of sexual gratification, they did
not hinder him in the fulfillment of his conjugal duties, the one did not exclude the other, on the contrary. Sometimes his wife suddenly transformed into the other woman from the past, and then he would take her with an energy and determination that shocked even him.
Whenever this happened, a spark would ignite in Emma Kruse and she felt an intensity, a heat, a closeness and a devotion which made her very happy.
But besides the image of the woman, he had brought something else from that time, which lay behind the line he had drawn, something that refused to leave him in peace. It was a dream that had begun during his imprisonment and which had hounded him ever since. Sometimes he was so afraid of it he did not even dare go to sleep. In the dream Otto Kruse died and waited for things to continue somehow. But everything remained jet black, nothing stirred, no sound, no light, no feeling, just a black nothingness, and Otto Kruse was inside this black nothingness, waiting and waiting, gradually becoming afraid, gradually panicking, gradually believing he would crack up at any moment, and wanting to scream, but he had no mouth, and wanting to stare, but he had no eyes, and wanting to pinch himself, but he had no hands, nor legs or feet either, nor anything at all that might be human. Then he would wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, and lie on his back in the darkness, staring until he could discern something, listening to the breathing of his young wife and touching his face, his body until he was absolutely certain. When his second child was born a year later, a girl he called Gudrun, he nourished the hope that these black nights would become less frequent, that the increasing weight of his new reality must keep pressing down on the business of the past until finally it no longer had any form, but was as flat as a piece of paper.
But this did not happen.
49
Lisa was reading a book. It told the story of an Italian faced with two decisions. Both would save his life. The first was simple. Do you wish to die here and now as an Italian partisan, or go on living as a Jew? The second decision was not so clear cut. If I have to die, the electric fence surrounding this Auschwitz is my final guarantee that I can choose the time of my death myself.