Beneath the Universe
Page 19
“Cora,” Zelda asked kindly, “is your father alright?”
Cora lingered on the question. Finally, she shook her head. Zelda seemed to be considering what to do. She rocked the baby absentmindedly, pacing the floor of the bedroom. Finally she stopped and looked at Cora, resolve in her face.
“I’m not going to ask what happened. We must consider that you’re an orphan now. And so is he. I don’t know what Theatrice is going to do, but I don’t trust her. The question is, Cora, do you trust me?”
Cora thought about it. Zelda had always been kind to her, warm and loving. She had worried over her and taken care of her when everyone else had forgotten. But was she like Cora’s parents? Did she think the baby ought not to exist? She hadn’t thrown him down when she saw his disfigurement. She hadn’t shrunk away in horror. She was very calm right now. Cora nodded. Yes, she did trust Zelda.
“I’m going to take you both to my house. I’m going to make a few phone calls and then we’re going to leave. We can’t stay for a funeral. We haven’t much time. You’ll have to say goodbye to your mother now. I know that’s not fair but can you do it?”
Cora was trying to think. It was happening so fast. Did Zelda really mean to take her away from all this? Her brother, too? Cora didn’t answer, but looked at her mother and hugged her. She wanted to lie there forever, let Zelda take the baby so Cora could slip into whatever abyss her mother had gone into. What about her father? The authorities would be after her, maybe even the Gestapo. Her father was gone and now she would never have his love. Now her mother was gone, too. She was alone in the world. But there was still her brother, alive and now screeching to be fed. And there was Zelda, someone who had guessed everything and still reached out to her with a loving hand. Cora wiped the hair from her mother’s forehead and kissed it.
“I love you, mummy,” she said, “With all my heart.”
EPILOGUE
September 1989 (Columbia University)
Isaac Hartmann rubbed his face with his good hand as he sat back in his office chair. There was a new freshman class waiting for him. The first day of school was always the hardest, just as it had been when he was a child. Only now, no one teased him about his deformity publicly. He was a good teacher, well liked by students and staff alike. He could see the shocked expressions on some of the kids faces the first time he entered the room. He always wore a short sleeved dress shirt the first day. Giving them a good view of his shriveled arm was shocking but it cut right to the questions about what was wrong with him. Once he got that out of the way he could focus on teaching.
His office was a testament of success. On his bookcase was the baseball championship trophy, MVP for pitching a perfect game junior year. Next to it, his degrees. And next to those his family portrait. His wife, Lily, had given him the frame for their fifth anniversary. At the time, the fertility treatments, doctor visits and multiple nights praying followed by fighting followed by more praying had been too much. They had agreed that night that for once they wouldn’t discuss it. But the gifts came out and Lily had chosen a beautiful cherry wood frame with a note “For all that is to come.” Isaac hadn’t known whether to scream or screw on the smile that said everything was fine. He hated public displays of emotion, so he waited until they had left the restaurant and Lily had gone to bed before he threw it away. Four days later, his longsuffering wife presented him with the pregnancy test and the most perfect smile he’d ever seen. He dumped the trash can all over the driveway so he could salvage the frame before garbage day.
Standing before the bookcase he picked up the framed photo, gratitude welling in him as he stared at his family. They had four boys, all able bodied, handsome and each one a different kind of headache for their parents but every one worth it. Lily had said after their last was born that her “baby factory” was now closed for business. But that didn’t stop Isaac from secretly hoping to someday have a little girl. He’d shared as much with Cora and even though his big sister always took Lily’s side he could see her eyes light up every time a new Disney princess movie was made.
Cora was happy for him no matter what. She herself never married but she had always been part of his kids’ lives not to mention his own biggest cheerleader, though his aunt had been a close second. His uncle Emil wasn’t as vocal as the women in Isaac’s life but he was a good man. He kept out of Isaac’s way for the most part, reminding the girls that a young man needed privacy. He had, however, stepped in before Isaac could make the biggest mistake of his life. Lily and Isaac had been high school sweethearts, but when it came time for college Isaac decided to break things off. They would be at two different schools and he was young, after all. Why shouldn’t he be single and given a chance to sow some wild oats? Lily had taken it pretty well but when Isaac told his family his uncle pulled him swiftly into his room and told him in no uncertain terms not to let a stupid thing like distance mess up the best thing he ever had. Isaac had tried to argue that Emil couldn’t understand. What he hadn’t known was how Emil and Zelda had also been unable to be together. They had both fought for the resistance but to maintain their covers they had to lead completely separate lives. Aunt Zelda had worked between cities, transporting letters between families and aid workers. Uncle Emil had been under cover as an SS officer at a concentration camp. He hadn’t committed any of the acts of violence Isaac had heard so much about but he had been forced to stand by and allow more atrocities than he was willing to talk about.
“My point, Isaac” he said, “Is that your aunt and I went through hell. So if you want to be an idiot and give up because you might not want to deal with a long distance relationship or because you might miss out on a few juvenile indiscretions, well . . . you’d better think long and hard about what that means to us. There is no room for selfish behavior in this family. We raised you better than that and if you just quit because it might be hard, then I’ve failed you.”
At the time, Isaac had been so shocked to actually be lectured by Emil that he hadn’t been able to say anything. But after the wedding he made sure to hug his uncle and thank him for everything.
Now, years later and having taught about the war for so long, Isaac realized how small his thanks had been. He was thinking about his family again as he gathered his materials and walked down to meet his class. He greeted them as he did every semester, answered their usual questions, abided the stares and mumbled comments. For some reason, he couldn’t shake thoughts of his family, his birth. So he did something he had never done before and told his students about his birth and its aftermath.
As a child, he’d never grasped the magnitude of what Zelda and Emil had done, let alone Cora. It was a bedtime story, about him sure, but so removed from his memory it may as well have happened to someone else. It wasn’t until the day he showed his class photographs from the concentration camps for the first time. Seeing the reactions; tears welling up, eyes averted, heads down had given him a twinge of pride for an instant thinking that he could engage his students so well. But it wasn’t about him and it wasn’t about showing them something so shocking it would make them pay attention. The pictures, the stories . . . none of it had anything to do with making them better students or him a more effective teacher. These weren’t poems or novels or films nominated for Oscars. These were pictures of real people, memories of real tragedy.
And he saw it, something he’d missed before. Of course, he’d known that among the millions of victims were people with deformities. He’d studied Mengele and the other sadists who delighted in dissecting people just like him. But it hadn’t hit him until he saw a photograph from Mauthausen. The startling decay of prisoners in body and soul was why he had included it. But in the background sitting on the stoop of a barracks was a man with a crooked arm. He was facing the camera and Isaac could feel the man’s sunken eyes staring through the decades right at him.
After that, his approach to teaching was different. He didn’t force his students to memorize dates or lines of succession. He demande
d something more. He taught that history was sacred. Life was to be reverenced regardless of century or circumstance. Even the bad guys had a story. History, he had learned, was not about names and dates. It wasn’t the simple black and white truth so many of his students took it to be. And it was their responsibility to make sure their generation wasn’t one who gave callous answers and thoughtlessly scribbled essays. If they didn’t learn to respect those who had sacrificed, then how would their children? Or their children’s children? He was explaining this idea when one young woman raised her hand.
“Yes?” Isaac called on her.
“If opinions are passed down from generation to generation, why did your sister choose something different from your parents? Wouldn’t she have believed what they did?”
“That’s a very good point,” Isaac admitted. “What I failed to mention, Miss . . .”
“Goldberg.”
Isaac smiled, “Miss Goldberg. What I failed to mention is that while history is about passing down opinions it is the times when someone decides to think for them self that’s the good stuff. I can offer ideas but I can’t tell you what to do or even what to believe. That’s up to you. That’s what has the power to change the world.”
Miss Goldberg raised her hand again.
“Yes?”
“Do you really believe your sister changed the world?”
Isaac thought for a moment. The horrors of the Holocaust had continued for months after Cora saved him. Even at the end of the war there was still suffering across the globe. Genocide had not been eradicated by Cora’s one small act of bravery nor by any one person’s. But as Isaac would teach his students, it was the little acts that made a difference, maybe not always to the whole world, but to those they saved. Did Cora change the world, he thought.
“She changed mine.”
* * *
[1] Equivalent to First Lieutenant
[2] Equivalent to Major
[3] Equivalent to Private First Class
[4] A cap
[5] A prisoner assigned to administrative and supervisory tasks
[6] Equivalent to Staff Sergeant
[7] Nazi breeding homes