by Jenna Blum
Moving from the window, she sets the little gold case on the dresser and finishes packing Anna's things. A favorite brooch, an afghan, hairbrushes. Trudy snaps the latches shut and takes a last look around; she will not be seeing this place again. She hefts the suitcase and leaves.
She is halfway down the stairs when she suddenly turns, runs back up, and seizes the gold case. She slips it into her coat pocket. Then she hurries from the bedroom, this time for good, her breath coming and going in ghosts.
10
ALTHOUGH SLEET SLICKS THE ROADS ON THE WAY BACK TO the Twin Cities, Trudy manages to arrive on the university campus a few minutes before her scheduled office hours. This is a relief; Trudy hates being late, the way rushing from place to place frays her composure, leaves her sweating and disheveled with her socks falling down inside her boots. She is also grateful to see that no students are lying in wait for her. When Trudy is her best self, she likes talking to them—in fact, she delights in any sign of their intellectual effort, no matter how small. But the past twenty-four hours have been trying, and Trudy knows that were her pupils to seek her out now, she would be impatient with their ever-ringing cell phones, their fidgeting embarrassment at being in such close proximity to her; their improbable, grammatically incorrect, unpleasantly intimate excuses as to why they haven't turned their assignments in on time.
Today, Trudy thinks, with any luck, the weather or the demands of their mysteriously busy lives will prevent them from coming to see her. She needs the hour to shift gears from her personal persona to her professorial one. She helps herself to a cup of coffee from the History Department hot plate and hangs her damp coat, then assumes her usual post at her desk and pulls a pile of midterms onto the blotter. With an air of diligence, Trudy uncaps her red pen.
The Mother's Cross, the top paper is entitled, An Examination of German Women as Breed-Horses of the Third Reich. Trudy sighs and flips open the oaktag folder to the first page:
It has been argued and indeed perported by historians of the time period under discussion, that is to say the Third Reich, that during this time period the German woman was viewed by the Nazi Government as a Baby-Machine, that is to say she was valued for her fertilization abilities above all. A partickular Award was awarded to German women that produced three, six or nine Purebloded children, bronze silver and gold respecktively, and from this an implication can be drawn that the real station the German woman occupied during this time period was the stable. She was merely a Breed-Mare or Horse.
Trudy refrains from scribbling, Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about? in the margin and instead writes spell-check so vehemently that her pen rips the paper. Then she closes the folder and pushes it aside. perhaps she is not in quite the right mood for grading after all. She tilts her chair back and stares at the far wall, where the room's only decoration hangs: an archival photograph, enlarged to poster size, of American soldiers marching German civilians to Buchenwald a few days after the camp's liberation, where they will be made to bury the dead. The afternoon is gray and gloomy—not unlike the one beyond Trudy's window right now—and the Amis are in army-issue slickers, their prisoners in patched wool coats. Toward the rear of the column, clinging to an invisible hand, is a small towheaded girl who could be the identical twin of Trudy at that age. She might in fact be Trudy herself.
Trudy is gazing at the poster without really seeing it when she hears the dreaded knock on the door. She tousles her hair, which from the feel of it is drying in stiff unattractive spikes, like whipped egg whites.
Come in, she calls, and arranges her features into what she hopes is a welcoming expression.
But it is not a student who enters; it is Dr. Ruth Liebowitz, Director of Holocaust Studies, from down the hall.
Have I caught you at a bad time, Dr. Swenson? she asks.
No, not at all. Why?
Ruth laughs. Your face, that constipated look you get when you're trying to seem helpful. You must be expecting a student.
Trudy pulls a mock scowl.
I was, yes, but mercifully nobody's shown up. Come on in, I still have—Trudy checks her watch—another twenty minutes. How are you?
Ruth drops into the chair on the other side of Trudy's desk and tucks her feet beneath her, catlike. Trudy watches her fondly. People meeting Ruth for the first time often mistake her for one of her own undergrads. Her small freckled face, her nimbus of frizzy hair, her uniform of sweater and rumpled khakis seem more appropriate to a freshman than somebody in Ruth's important position. And Ruth deliberately fosters this impression, using what she calls my disguise to her advantage whenever possible: on the first day of class, she sits among her students to hear what they say about her. In actuality, she is only nine years younger than Trudy.
I'm fine, Ruth says now. More to the point, how are you?
A little tired, but—What. Why are you giving me that look?
Ruth narrows her dark eyes.
Come on, kid. You skipped out on your classes yesterday. You weren't home last night. What's going on?
How do you know I wasn't home?
I called, says Ruth. Several times, actually.
Several times? What did you think, that I was dead on the floor?
Ruth glances away.
So I was a little worried, she mumbles defiantly.
Trudy hides a smile. Knowing that Trudy lives alone, Ruth is sometimes a bit overprotective, but it is also comforting to know that if Trudy were indeed dead on the floor, she wouldn't have to lie there for days before being found.
What if I had been entertaining a gentleman caller? Trudy asks.
Ruth looks delighted. Were you?
No, Trudy admits. She sinks back in her chair and rubs her eyes. I had to go to New Heidelburg. There was a situation with my mother.
Ruth's gaze sharpens further.
This is the difficult mother? The one I so rarely hear about?
Of course it's her. How many mothers do you think I have?
Ruth flaps an impatient hand. What happened?
She had a little accident.
What kind of accident?
Honestly, Ruth, what are you, the Gestapo?
Ruth maintains an unwavering stare. The historically impossible friendship between the two women, the unlikely alliance between a professor of German history and the head of Holocaust Studies, requires black humor, a way of acknowledging and thus defusing possible tensions. But neither has ever applied it to the other personally.
Sorry, says Trudy. I'm not quite myself today ... My mother's all right, it was nothing serious, but it's obvious she can't live by herself anymore. So I had to arrange to put her in a nursing home.
Ruth screws up her face in sympathy.
That's rough, she agrees. I know how it is. When we put my aunt in a home, she didn't speak to us for six months.
My mother hasn't spoken to me in fifty years, Trudy says, and laughs.
Again Ruth gives her a penetrating look, but she lets the subject drop.
Well, kid, she says, unfolding herself from the chair, if you want to talk about it, I'm here ... Oh! I almost forgot the other reason I came in here.
What's that?
Ruth braces her palms on Trudy's desk and sways forward.
We got it, she says dramatically.
Got what? Trudy asks.
Ruth gives the blotter an emphatic slap.
For the love of God, woman, wake up! The funding for the Remembrance Project.
Oh, says Trudy. Oh, good for you. How much did you get?
Ruth rolls her eyes. Not as much as I'd hoped for, naturally. But enough to contact area survivors, to hire interviewers and videographers. I can cut corners by having one of my doctoral students encode the tapes for the archives. And if all goes well, next year I can ask for more money—the sky's the limit.
That's fantastic, says Trudy. Congratulations—
This is such a feather in our cap. This'll put our program on the map in terms of record
ing Holocaust testimony, put us right up there with fucking Yale. And not even fucking Yale has survivor interviews on camera.
I know, says Trudy. You must be so proud.
I am, I have to admit, Ruth says, grinning. Her teeth are tiny and pearly and crooked; like baby teeth, Trudy thinks, milk teeth, Anna would call them. This Project is my baby ... But sometimes I think, what am I, nuts? There's so much work to be done—
Well worth it, Trudy assures her. Let me know if there's anything I can do.
Ruth settles a pert khaki-clad hindquarter on the corner of Trudy's desk, wrinkling the term papers.
Actually..., she says.
Oh, God, groans Trudy. I was just being polite, Ruth!
I thought you might want to try out, Ruth says.
Try out?
For an interviewer's position.
Me?
Yes, you.
Trudy shakes her head.
I don't understand, she says. Why would you want me? The Holocaust isn't my field of expertise.
Ruth waves this objection aside.
We have to get this off the ground quickly, she says, and we need historians who really know their stuff to be interviewers, and that means you. I think you'd be a natural. And you'd really be doing me a favor.
Trapped, Trudy swivels to the window and looks out. The quadrangle is deserted, the sleet being whipped sideways by a relentless wind, the Gothic red sandstone buildings gloomier than usual in the premature dusk. Her reflection hovers among them, transparent and watchful, a streetlamp in its throat.
It wouldn't matter that I'm not Jewish? she asks.
Well, of course you should be, since we are the chosen People, Ruth says tartly. But no, it wouldn't matter.
Huh, says Trudy.
Then she swings back around, reaching over to tug the papers from beneath Ruth's behind and stuff them into her briefcase.
I can't, she says. I'm sorry, Ruth. I'm truly flattered you asked. But I have such a full courseload this semester, as you know, and now there's this situation with my mother on top of everything else...
She feels herself flushing. Anna's transfer to the Good Samaritan center having already been arranged, there is nothing much left for Trudy to do except make a weekend visit to ensure that she's settled in. And this won't take much time. But Ruth doesn't need to know this.
And, as Trudy has expected, she buys the excuse.
Forgive me, she says, hopping off Trudy's desk. I forgot. But maybe, when things settle down with her ... Will you at least think about it?
Of course, Trudy lies.
Ruth goes to the door.
Good, she says. Because I'm going to keep after you.
She cocks a thumb and forefinger at Trudy in imitation of shooting a gun. You know where to find me if you change your mind, she adds, and leaves.
Congratulations again, Trudy calls to Ruth's departing footsteps in the hall. They are rapid. Ruth does everything quickly.
Trudy smiles, then glances at her watch. She swears and leaps from her chair, tugs her still-damp boots on, and grabs her briefcase. Yanking the door open, she nearly collides with the student who is standing on the other side of it, head hanging.
Professor Swenson? the girl mumbles to the carpet between her feet. Can I talk to you a minute? I'm so so so so sorry I missed class yesterday, I had this really really really bad urinary tract infection...
11
DESPITE TRUDY'S TENURED POSITION, HER AFTERNOON seminar, Women's Roles in Nazi Germany, is in the basement, the bowels of the university's History Department. At the beginning of her course, Trudy routinely refers to the classroom as the Bunker—Hi, folks, and welcome to our lovely Bunker!—trying to alleviate first-day awkwardness and take the temperature of her new class. If it is a nice humorous batch, the quip earns a few smiles, even muted chuckles. More often, though, the students just sit stone-faced, extravagantly unimpressed by this feeble attempt to win them over. Trudy supposes she can't blame them. There really is not much to laugh about in the prospect of spending an entire semester in a cramped windowless room, beneath light grids that resemble old-fashioned ice-cube trays, in little orange chairs better suited to midgets than the average undergrad.
Truth be told, however, Trudy likes her classroom: the safety of being underground, the warmth of all those bodies packed together. This is her domain, where for fifty minutes three times a week she is in complete control. Where history is documented and footnoted, confined to text. Comprehensible, if only in retrospect.
As she does at the start of each class, she snaps a fresh stick of chalk in two and stands rubbing her thumb over the rough edge, surveying her captive audience. It is a chocolate box of personalities; at this stage in the semester, Trudy knows each student, if not by name, then by trait. The quiet girl who arrives early and does crossword puzzles with obsessive zeal. The brilliant sophomore with the cobweb tattooed on her face. The two boys—Frick and Frack—who always sit poised for escape near the door, as identical in movement as twins though they are not related; if one is sick or absent, the other is also.
How are you all today? Trudy asks.
She waits with her eyebrows significantly raised until she gets a few incomprehensible responses. This is typical. The class runs at four o'clock, a bad time, the doldrums. Her pupils are sluggish, their circadian rhythms demanding naps, their stomachs requiring dinner. They blink at their feet, owlish and surly; they slouch in their chairs, doodling in their notebooks—flowers, hearts, intricate geometric configurations—drawings that, as far as Trudy can make out, have nothing to do with the material at hand. At the moment, her eyes grainy from lack of sleep and her difficult drive, Trudy wants nothing more than to join them. Especially as today's subject, a survey of German women as to what they did during the war, hits a bit close to home.
Yet somebody has to be the teacher here, so Trudy glances down at her notes and lectures as animatedly as she is able. She talks, pauses, asks whether there are any questions, applies her squeaking chalk to the board, but all the while she feels a growing humidity beneath her turtleneck. Flop sweat. Every professor is prone to it, gives an ill-received lesson on occasion, and Trudy, no exception, knows there is no shame in it. But each time it happens inspires the same panic as the first.
She pushes her damp bangs from her forehead and looks at her watch, which she has unstrapped and set on the lectern. Only ten minutes left, thank God.
Trudy bounces the chalk in her palm. So in the final analysis, she says, what did you take from today's reading? What point, if any, is the author trying to make about the way these particular German women acted during the war?
Silence.
Trudy frowns out at her students. Once they get going they are usually a talkative group, flirtatious even, which makes their apathy today all the more galling. Perhaps it is not her fault; perhaps they have fallen prey to Thanksgiving Syndrome, too much sleep and food at home, dread of upcoming exams. Trudy decides to prod them a little.
Come on, people, she says. Participation is part of your grade, you know ... What did you think of Frau Heidenreich saying that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves? Were you surprised that she still thinks this, even today?
Silence.
Is her attitude typical?
Silence.
Did anybody do the assigned reading?
Silence. Then, from the rear, a phlegmy yawn that sounds like a marble rattling in a vacuum cleaner hose.
Ms. Meyerson, Trudy says. If you must insult me in this fashion, please cover your mouth. I am tired of seeing your tonsils.
Some titters from the class. So they are awake, Trudy thinks.
Sorry, the offending student mutters. It's just that—
Just that what?
Of course the anti-Semite was typical, the student says, scowling ferociously at her notebook. All those women were anti-Semitic. They were, like, part of the whole war machine. They were the perps.
Excuse me?
/> The perpetrators.
Ah, says Trudy. So, German women were perpetrators. And you know something? I agree with you, to a degree. Many of them were. But was it entirely their fault? Were they not products of their culture—which as we've seen was rabidly anti-Semitic—as much as you or I are? Might they not have been forced into doing what they did by the war? Don't desperate times call for desperate measures?
Silence. A bead of sweat trickles down Trudy's ribcage.
All right, she says, walking out from behind her lectern to stand in front of the class. Let's try it this way. Let's make it personal. Let's say ... you're an Aryan German woman, circa 1940, 1941. About the age most of you are—twenty, twenty-one. Your normal life has been rudely interrupted by the war. Your husband is off fighting for the Vaterland, or already dead. Perhaps you have a small child to care for. And suddenly the Jews in your community start disappearing. Maybe you see it happening, maybe—as many of these women claimed—you don't. But you hear the rumors. You gossip, as women do. You know. And you know too that the price of resistance, or helping Jews—hiding them, feeding them, whatever—is death. What do you do?
Now they are listening.
The right thing, somebody calls.
Which is?
Well, duh. Helping the Jews, obviously. Any way you can.
Oh, come on, scoffs another student. That's, like, so naive. It sounds good, but like you'd really help if you knew you'd die for it. But not just, like, die. Be tortured first. And they'd kill your kid too.
I'd still do it, insists the first.
No, you just think you would, argues the second. It's easy to say you'd do something when you're just, like, sitting here in your chair.
You see? Trudy interjects. It's not so simple, is it? Most of us are drawn to this time period thinking it was a war of absolute good versus absolute evil—qualities rarely found in their purest form—and that's true. But don't forget that history isn't just a study in black and white. Human behavior is comprised of ulterior motives, of gray shades.