by Ursula Hegi
“And I believed her smile muscles were broken.”
Sonja Siderova considers that. Touches her lips and smiles. “Last time I taught my anatomy lesson, there was no such muscle.”
*
“When you became my teacher, I was afraid you wouldn’t like me.”
“Why?”
“Because she was your friend, and she didn’t like me. I used to think it was because of the grapes.” To say it aloud summons that familiar shame: What have I done wrong?
“Grapes?”
“I ate all her grapes. She called me greedy. Greedy like my mother. And that he, Michel, liked it . . . that greed in her.”
“Ilse’s love for you was . . . a complicated love. People said you brought her good luck, that when she became pregnant, it was from having you in the house.”
Thekla has to smile. “That’s beyond immaculate conception.”
“Far beyond. Supposedly, you stirred up her mothering instincts. But as soon as Ruth was born, Ilse weaned herself from you. Abruptly. You didn’t like it one bit. Stomped your feet. Clung to her.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’ve never forgiven her for that.”
“What I do remember is how she was constantly at me about proper manners.”
“You did love her, as a small child.”
Chapter 38
IT WAS EASIER with Michel. He was kind to me. Always.”
“Once he started to see himself in you—his quick mind, his own laughter—he wanted to give you whatever was his. He told me you enchanted him. But he also liked the . . . call it anguish of not being with you all the time.”
Thekla tries to take that in.
“For him—” Sonja Siderova stops. “I think for him, love was too easy with the children he could openly name as his own.”
“Once I was playing in front of our school, and he was across the street, about to go into the synagogue. When he saw me, he waited, asked if I wanted to come along. I ran to him. He took my hand in his. . . .” Thekla is back inside the synagogue with him, one hand against a marble pillar, not cold like marble in her church, just wood painted to look like marble. But the light is like the light inside her church because of the stained-glass windows. “Jerusalem,” Herr Abramowitz says and points to the front. “That’s where Jerusalem is.” She nods, wants him to be proud of how much she knows about Jerusalem, tells him that’s where the Jews crucified Jesus. But he puckers his lips together as if tasting something bad. “Let me show you something beautiful,” he says, cups the top of her hair, gently, and leads her into the most beautiful library she’s seen, old books and scrolls and tables. “A house of study and a house of prayer,” he tells her. “You belong here, too.”
You belong here, too. Knowing. The familiar warmth. And expecting him to be there. He was always there. She’s overcome by an urgency to see him, have him tell her—Tell me what? What I already know? That he thinks of me as his daughter? I want to hear him say it. Am terrified to hear him say it.
Thekla is reeling with uncertainty. Only last year Fräulein Siderova was taking her students on hikes. But now she’s not allowed to teach. Because she is Jewish. And soon Thekla will no longer be teaching. If she lets it be known that—That Herr Abramowitz is her father.
—Nein nein jetzt nicht. Weg damit—No no not now. Away with this—
But it’s all unraveling, and she can’t breathe.
How dare they? Isolate us first and then persecute us?
“Markus’s parents understood the danger,” she whispers.
Sonja nods.
“It’ll get worse, right?”
“Each indignity made possible by the previous one.”
“The one I keep thinking about is my—is Michel Abramowitz . . . and if he’s safe.”
“How far are you with your Ahnenpass?”
“I need two more documents.”
“Get them. Fast. Get Wilhelm Jansen down on the line for father.”
“He is on my birth certificate. Except the date is wrong, October instead of January.”
“You were born in October.”
“What?”
*
“When Almut moved back to Burgdorf, you were starting to walk. To make the numbers fit, she told everyone you were eight months old, that she’d married the toymaker the spring she moved to Nord-strand, and that you were born the following January.”
“She said someone made a mistake.”
“Someone sure did,” Sonja blurts.
“I was told how I walked early . . . how well coordinated I was for my age. Except it wasn’t my age.”
“But that’s how you’ve thought about yourself all along.”
“Yes,” Thekla says, surprised.
“Use your valuable Aryan ancestors. I would. If I had them.”
“No reason to make it public now . . . about Michel Abramowitz.”
“Absolutely not,” Sonja says urgently. “Promise me—no heroics. Too dangerous.”
“Public is the wrong word. It’s not—”
“Listen to me, the Ahnenpass is not an ethical document. It forces disclosure to an unethical government.”
“I mean open, not public. Open between him and me.”
“Wait until being his daughter is no longer a threat to you.”
“But I want to see him. Make sure he’s safe.”
“What can you possibly do to protect him?”
“I—I don’t know yet.”
“There’s nothing.”
Thekla blinks.
“The ones you can protect are our boys. But only if you protect yourself. Remind yourself what you’re willing to do to teach. You’ve already proven that.”
“I’m sorry.” Thekla brings one hand to her throat. “What should I have said when Sister Josefine came to me? Would you have wanted me to refuse?”
“Yes,” Sonja says. “No.” Her chin puckers. “I don’t know.”
“I have been so afraid to come to you. Can we talk again . . . like this? Please?”
No answer.
“If Sister Josefine figures this out—If people put it all together—” Thekla shakes her head. “So I’m suddenly Jewish at thirty-four?”
Sonja laughs aloud. “You’re coming to it so late. That must count for something.”
*
When Sonja stops laughing, she says, “We’ll talk about our boys. We’ll have to.” She reaches across and touches Thekla’s wrist.
It’s a gesture of such unfathomable comfort that Thekla’s eyes fill with tears. Then, that smell again, chalk and of sleep. Soon, bones only. Oh, Bruno—Standing alone in the schoolyard, pretending not to notice the boys who’re taunting you. Knocking at my door and hiding till I pick you up, swirl you around. Because of your long limbs, I assume you’ll be almost weightless, but you’re surprisingly solid in my arms as I swirl you—
And in this swirl it’s all happening at once and forever—Bruno suffocating inside the chess wardrobe, Marinus walking toward the guillotine, Jochen longing to be a hero, Schiller’s diver getting crushed by the sea, Markus fleeing to America—and Thekla, too, is sucked into that vortex, Ilse’s lost child, and though it’s the past and she cannot change the past and has seen her moral courage for the frail thing it has become, that courage now flares up within her.
No more—
No more.
What seemed so benevolent at first—equality and community and employment for everyone—turned out to be lies that the Führer slipped into schools and homes, seducing and warping, until the people believed they were choosing for themselves; and out of this, they fabricated tales that were more distorted than mismatched fairy-tale blocks, more bizarre than any toymaker would have invented.
*
In the hallway window, that splinter of moon. Come dawn, it may still be visible when her boys walk to school. How much of her teaching has led them toward Schiller’s cliff, toward the orders of a mad leader? When she left out the stanzas abo
ut the young diver’s death, it was to shield her boys. Instead, she left out the danger beneath the surface. What if it’s too late to make up what she kept from them?
No more.
Tomorrow she must warn her boys about the diver’s second leap. That poem should not be listed under “courage” in the Echtermeyer. “Hubris” would be a more accurate heading. Fate may exalt you once, but to mistake that for allegiance and expect it again is arrogant. In too many poems that quest for heroism leads to death. Take Strachwitz’s “Das Herz von Douglas,” when the crusader’s heart is pierced by the lance of a pagan. Or Fontane’s “John Maynard,” where it’s death by water and death by fire. How many ways can one body die?
Tomorrow she’ll get to school early, write Schiller’s missing stanzas on the chalkboard. When her boys arrive, they’ll copy the stanzas, recite them together. That’s how she’ll begin. But the day after tomorrow, she’ll introduce doubt into the diver’s eagerness, encourage her boys to talk about different endings to the poem. What if the young diver had not stepped toward the mad king? What if he had not leapt into the rough waters? By imagining themselves as the diver, they’ll unmask loyalty, glory.
She’ll bring her boys through this, remind them that they, too, know what it is like to listen to tales around the flames, shivering, seeking even larger scares—creatures, colossal and primitive—that surpass all you’ve ever known. How you shift closer to one another, lean toward the flames, your feet hot, and reach with your sticks to turn the potatoes you’ve rolled into the fire, while you tell stories about a nebulous creature that takes on body to chase your souls. And yet, this is the kind of beast you can let near because you know—so deeply it lies beyond your earliest memories—that any beast you conjure cannot abscond with you. It’s something your ancestors must have felt: to drive out the beast, you must first give it body, for all of you to see and fear and laugh at until you fathom what you truly are afraid of.