by Steven Uhly
They had not finished their bowls when the men stood up noisily, as if in response to a secret order, and left the tavern. Five minutes later it was empty and quiet in the room, the only other living being was the waitress clearing the tables with rapid movements. The expression on her face had not changed, Am I like this too? Lisa wondered briefly, Do I always wear the same expression? She understood that the appearance gave away nothing of its causes, maybe her father beat her, maybe he had died in the war, maybe she was unhappy in love, maybe she hated her work because she imagined herself destined for greater things, maybe she disliked autumn, maybe she was having her period. Or, to put it the other way around, how many opportunities do we have to react to things that happen to us in life? Do we really try to find a reaction to every cause, or do we become used to reacting to very different things in the same way, maybe for the sake of convenience or simply because we fail to notice and does our character develop only then?
Frau Kramer had finished her soup. Wiping her mouth with the napkin, she looked thoughtfully at her granddaughter, who was still eating, bowed to her fate once more and said, “Shall I go on?”
“Yes.”
56
A train stopped in the station. It was so long that half the passengers had to jump into the slushy snow as the platform was much shorter. The train was so long that those who jumped into the snow immediately had a fine, cold membrane spun around them by the drizzle, which unceremoniously let them know that it was pointless, after days of traveling through this country in ruins, to hope for any better.
Amongst these people was the woman who would later tell of this, and the child to whom she would later tell it, the child that lay warm and snug between her breasts and was asleep at this hour, it was still dark, as dark as it can only be in winter, only in wartime winter when even large cities are barely visible at short distance, and so it was for the woman with the child, they stood in the slush, the rain had already cast its net over them, but they could see nothing save for the night itself, and the night was no different from other nights, perhaps this was a mistake, she thought, perhaps the train driver had simply had enough and got off, perhaps the authorities had changed their plans because Lübeck was still much further and had decided, Let them stay here in the middle of nowhere. Another possibility was that Lübeck had vanished too, obliterated, and this was Lübeck, but Lübeck offered no more than this: snow and rain. The woman with the child entertained all these thoughts within a matter of seconds and she was overcome with fear.
But then a utility vehicle arrived, its headlights blinding the bunch of troublemakers standing around cluelessly, and a man clutching a loudhailer stood up, then instructed them to form a queue, at most four abreast, and follow him to the emergency billets. The people plodded on their way, including the woman with the child, she was shattered and hungry, and it barely mattered that she was alive, for dying was not an option, only managing the final stretch, step by step, and continuing to breathe in the cold air of this new home.
This new home did not want its new locals. It had enough trouble looking after itself, it was as if the island on which Lübeck stood had become a fortress again, not against the Red Army, which was speeding like wildfire toward the pre-war borders of the German Reich, but against all the beasts, both animal and human, fleeing westward from this blaze. So the emergency billets were out of town, Did you know? the woman would say one day, where we drove past today, no, not exactly, but a bit further east, there used to be large farms with damp barns, that’s where we had to walk, it went on forever, nobody knew, Where on earth is Lübeck? Are we walking there? How come Lübeck station is so far from the city? Nobody told us a thing, we followed the red taillights of a utility vehicle along a wet country road, the drizzle gradually soaked us, our journey took so long that there were some who couldn’t go any further and some who suddenly started screaming, This is a death march, they’re going to kill us, but the others managed to quieten down the panickers and so we kept going, I thought, She’s going to wake up any minute now and I’m going to have to feed her, How can I possibly do that here?, but you just kept on sleeping as if you’d realized what was happening and were determined to hang on in, this is what the woman would say one day, struggling to retain her composure with each sentence, as if a sentence were a narrow ridge leading into the distance above the past, and woe betide anyone who plummeted back into this past.
When they arrived and fell onto the cold, damp straw and went to sleep, it was that same night when at several points the Red Army crossed the eastern pre-war border of the Reich. When they awoke and had nothing to eat because the provisioning was poor and because the city of Lübeck had enough trouble looking after itself, the rumor went around that many thousands had arrived already and many thousands more were heading this way, and the occupants of the cold, damp barns soon came to share the opinion of the inhabitants of Lübeck, They should go elsewhere, it’s already full here, but there was no elsewhere, one day the child who was no longer a child would fancy that history is sometimes like a film played backward, when everything flows back into the jug from which it has been poured, such was this human reflux into the vessel of the German Reich, which one thousand years earlier had started inclining eastward, and one day people could quite justifiably argue that the thousand-year Reich was in truth the end of the thousand-year Reich.
But such ideas did not concern the people, nothing concerned them more than the question of food, the children cried with hunger, And you cried too, but there was nothing I could do for you, the woman would say, crying herself.
Finally, in the afternoon, lorries arrived with forced laborers and soldiers, who handed out rations, the refugees formed a queue outside the barns and in the distance saw the manor house, a magnificent building, three children playing outside, hurling snowballs at each other, glancing over at us from time to time, soon losing interest. Suddenly, as the people were waiting and freezing, we heard the droning that we all knew, they stopped distributing food, the people scoured the overcast sky, the droning came closer, growing louder and louder, there must be lots of them, soon all they could hear was the droning, but there was nothing to see, the unit passed invisibly over their heads toward some German city where they would drop their loads like seed that instantly sprouted, they would sow a sea of red flowers, whose blooms needed to last no longer than a death.
When the droning subsided the food distribution resumed and finally the woman had milk for her child and something to eat for herself, it was not much, But after all that screaming and crying you were so tired that you went straight back to sleep and so did I.
How long did they stay in the barn? Months it was, having departed, the winter returned, as if it had forgotten something, it snowed, We were stranded. A little boy fell ill and had to be isolated, there was a doctor amongst the refugees, he ordered the boy be quarantined, which made everything more cramped, two days later the boy was dead, his mother died inside and lived on.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, was the thought that would now strike the young woman who was once the other woman’s child. But no feeling would ensue, rather this seemed to be the wrong adage, as if somewhere there must be a different, a more fitting adage for such cases and, at that moment, in that tavern in Sereetz at the beginning of the 1960s, she would begin her search for this more fitting adage without ever in the future being able to state, That’s precisely when it started.
When at last the winter disappeared for good, the people in the barn fled outside, the owners of the estate wanted to stop this happening, they sent over their forced laborers as if they had suddenly been promoted to chief forced laborers, but of course these failed to accomplish anything, neither the lord of the manor nor his wife showed their face, their children no longer played outside the house, after three days an S.S. man arrived on his bicycle to herd them back into the barn, he was so young that he must still be a schoolboy. The people were livid, they berated him, a woman screamed
, You got us all into this, you with your Führer, with your arrogance, you with your war in the east. They slung mud at him, literally, causing him to beat a hasty retreat, he fled, red-faced, on his bike. What a victory, the young woman would think ironically and bitterly on the day this story was told.
But then the supplies failed to appear, one day passed, two days, the children started screaming again and the people thought this was the revenge of the S.S., I was so worried about you. She did not say what she had thought: what would my life be without this child, who God placed in my arms? I don’t want to die inside and somehow go on, I don’t want to have to live with the fact that everyone I love is dead, I’d rather be dead myself and feel nothing more.
But no, it was not the revenge of the S.S., it was the British, and when they came to the barn with tanks and soldiers and ambulances everything changed.
How? Lisa would ask, and her grandmother would sigh and continue the story.
57
The drama had a stage as long as the journey from Berlin to Marseille, it had more leading actors than any feature film, it had enough props to fill thirty-three lorries, it had a motorcycle escort with a homemade police uniform, it had a Peretz Sarfati, who was playing William Lloyd, William Lloyd had theater passes for all zonal borders, Soviet, American, French, he had a forged group visa for five hundred emigrants to Colombia, with a list of names attached, beautiful French names, he hoped this would not cause a problem with the border posts north of Strasbourg when the Jewish rescue organization, which would only appear in this one scene, would blag all the Abramowiczes, Tuchynskis, Ochlowskis, Klaubers, Staijns and whatever they were called into France, always referred to as Kassuta in the playful conversations conducted between the secret agents of the Institution for Immigration B, why Kassuta, what was that supposed to mean? It did not matter, the key thing was to arrive at the border of Kassuta north of Strasbourg on Saturday afternoon, so read the stage direction, on Saturday afternoons the border guards of the Grande Nation were impatient, they wanted their weekend to begin, so it might not occur to them that they were letting into their country a horde of actors who in truth possessed nothing, no real country, no proper families, no life to speak of, and yet were pretending they had all this and were traveling on an official U.N. mission. What beautiful stamps the document forgers in Paris and Munich had made, wonderful, no one had ever seen stamps like them, officialdom was nothing but a universal form you could invent over and over again, and they were absolute masters at this.
The penultimate act in this drama was not called Marseille, but Sidney. Why Sidney? Why not? And the ship was not called President Warfield, but “The Enema,” and Ephraim Frank, Shmaria Zamaret, Shaul Meirov and the other shlichim from Palestine knew precisely why they called it that, but they had long stopped laughing at the idea of a pair of pale white British buttocks implicitly belonging to His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and a ship carrying four and a half thousand Jews rammed into this tight anus, inevitably tearing it apart. Bastards, that is how the British were referred to on the secret stage of telephone conversations right across Europe.
For Anna and her people the drama began in the middle of a warm summer’s night at the beginning of July 1947. The first act was climbing aboard the lorries. Peretz had brought his wife, son and new daughter to Schlachtensee where they had to be patient, for the lorries took secret routes through the city so as not to attract the attention of M.I.6 agents. The pioneers, ma’pilim, as they were called in Bricha’s secret lexicon, used the time to learn their parts by heart, leaning on wooden houses they had left for good, sitting in the meadows where they had played football, beneath the clothes props they would not use again, and muttering their names to themselves, their nationalities, their survival stories, all of which had to have some connection with concentration camps to make the right impression. Around them crickets chirped and small animals rustled, the summer was underway in the night with its great variety of life.
Anna sat on her suitcase, her knees drawn up to her body, her arms slung around her legs like a little girl. From now she would be Jeanne Pérault, she would be five years older so that Sarah could pass as her daughter, she had survived Auschwitz, she was on her way to Colombia, Colombia had issued entry visas to her and the four hundred and ninety-nine other emigrants from the camp at Schlachtensee, she and her children were going to begin a new life there.
Anna repeated the names and dates of her new identity, observing herself as she did so with the precision of a researcher who never blinks. She saw that the woman she had become in this place wanted to hold on to it, to this routine, this Wannsee, this Schlachtensee, this limbo, which seemed to amount to nothing concrete, nothing binding. But all this dissolved before her eyes, as if having been doused with acid. And as she watched the dissolution, everything was already solidifying again into new vistas, distant destinations into fixed routes and the routes into clearly defined sections, Soviet zone, American zone, overnight stay in D.P. camp Lindenfels, following day French zone in Worms, border crossing into France north of Strasbourg, boarding the special train, on to Lyon, overnight journey to Marseille, embarkation.
That is roughly how Peretz had described the impending journey, he had been curt when picking up Anna, Sarah and Shimon in his jeep from the Sweden Pavilion, no large audience, no theatrical kiss, and Anna had sensed that he was protecting himself from her with these two quite different modes of behavior. What actually is there between affected happiness and affected distance? wondered the woman who did not blink, seeing through all emotions. There’s nothing, the woman told Anna, but Anna tried to be Jeanne, but the woman said, you don’t have a name, and that was a peculiar feeling. The woman changed, she turned into Josef Ranzner, like someone assuming a disguise, and kept talking in her woman’s voice, saying, You don’t have a name, because nobody apart from me knows what really happened. And then she dragged the four adjutants in front of her eyes, one after the other, it all happened so quickly that Anna could barely look, but when she understood she saw Peretz and Abba, and it started again from the beginning, for now there was a flick book in a child’s hands, surely there must be something new to see, she flicked through so quickly that all these men inevitably became a single man, And which man would that be? the child wondered.
Anna did not wish to know, she fixed her gaze on the external world, she clung to her people, who were oblivious to the most important thing about her and yet were still her people. Or was it the other way around? Was it that she had nobody, but these strangers had her?
Anna sat on her suitcase, in front of her in the dry grass was Sarah with Shimon on her lap, learning her role, Anna could see her lips moving, she suspected that in the darkness Sarah’s gaze was directed inward, what did she see there, did she also have a woman inside with no name, who slipped on masks? Anna watched Shimon. She had just breastfed him, now he was playing dozily with the ends of Sarah’s hair, any moment now his eyes would close and he would fall asleep. What did Shimon know about Sarah that had caused him to let her into his life without a shred of resistance? Was there a flick book inside Shimon with only two faces, Anna and Sarah, Anna and Sarah? Had he seen the one woman that they both were?
Anna looked away, her gaze fell on Emil, who was sitting next to Sarah. Emil had internalized his role long ago, he simmered with excitement about their arrival in Palestine, when he could put on a real uniform and fight against Israel’s enemies, for him the journey was a necessary evil, he hoped it would pass quickly, Anna knew this, she envied the clarity of his purpose, How did he manage to externalize everything, channel everything into anger, what trick had he mastered?
The Abramowiczes, who were sitting right beside him, father, mother, Marja, asked each other questions in Hebrew, in their eyes there was only Eretz Yisrael since their reunion, even the children had to learn the new language, Maybe, Anna thought, a language is like a weapon to combat the internal enemy, maybe a language is like a bridgehead
you can occupy and cannot be driven from, is that right? Only Dana the doll continued speaking German, Because dead people can’t learn new languages, Marja had said, and nobody could object to this.
The old man sat against a nearby tree, frowning as he studied his piece of paper, Why do I want all this trouble at my age? he may have been thinking, but at least he had a name again, he, who had lost his own when his entire family took it with them into a mass grave, when he survived in circumstances that were not explained.
Where’s Ruth? Anna thought, looking around. There she was, sitting on a bench beside her Aaron. A right pair of lovebirds, Anna thought, feeling a flicker of hope inside her, as remote as a fading memory, and feeling envy, but an envy weakened by doubt, Did it really exist, love? Her gaze alighted on Ariel, sitting slightly to the side, his legs outstretched on the dark earth, bent over his Odyssey in the dim light of a candle he held in his right hand, moths flitting all around, whose death he was paying no attention to, self-contained like an island in the Mediterranean, How often must he have read it by now, what new things could he possibly discover between the lines, would they ever find out, or did Ariel, vulnerable as he was, spend all his time reading simply to avoid exposing himself to what was happening? Had Ariel discovered a trick for outwitting uncontrollable destiny by blending life with a story that had already played out, whose conclusion was set down for all time?
It was long past midnight by the time the lorries finally arrived, the little children had fallen asleep, Dana the doll lay with eyes open on Marja’s tummy, the dead do not sleep, the dead speak German, Anna felt a twinge.
The lorries drove in like a silent procession, slowly rolling monsters, They ought to have a monument erected to them, think what we owe these lorries, everything. But at the same moment Anna was struck by a feeling of tightness, a shortness of breath, she would rather not get on board, she would rather stay there than be pressed and jammed in again, who knew how long it would be this time? But when they all got up to watch the arrival of the lorries as they formed a semicircle and finally came to a halt with their engines still running, steel heroes who seemed to be saying, We’ve come to rescue you, somebody grabbed Anna’s waist and held her tightly. Anna jumped, beside her stood Ruth who said softly, We’ve got to go now. She gave Anna a crooked smile and Anna clasped her own shoulders.