Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  Maybe Joshua is as good at lying as I am.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MY FIRST TELEPHONE CALL COMES ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, after the ad has run for two full days. But it is not a call from anyone who might join in Bryda’s lawsuit. It is a call from Ilsa.

  “Margie,” she says right away when I pick up, and I sigh with relief at the sound of her voice. Two days I’ve left work early, avoiding Shelby’s questioning looks, and I’ve run home to stare at the telephone, where I’ve willed it not to ring the entire hour.

  “Oh, Ilsa,” I say. “I’m glad it’s you.”

  “My dear,” she says, and I can picture her on the other end of the line, shaking her petite blond head. “Why on earth is your telephone number in the Inquirer?”

  “Oh.” I draw in my breath. I have not considered the possibility that Ilsa, the one person who knows my number other than Joshua, might see the ad and find it perplexing. “Well . . .” I say, though I am not sure what I should say next. Lying is a second skin, but it is failing me now. The first skin feels warm, ripened, ready to break to the surface.

  “Spit it out, my dear,” Ilsa says. Ilsa is not my sister, nor my mother. She is the American cousin of my mother’s German friend Eduard. After I told Eduard I needed to come to America, he persuaded Ilsa to sponsor me and take me in. Our relationship is a strange one because it is not quite a friendship. She holds a power over me, and not because she means to, or necessarily even wants to. But still, she does. When Ilsa asks me for the truth, sometimes I am compelled to give it.

  “I am helping my boss with something,” I say. “With a case.”

  “Involving anti-Semitism?” she says, sounding skeptical. I imagine her pulling at her earlobe a little, the way she does when something her husband, Bertram, tells her makes her nervous.

  “Sort of,” I say, “But it is very top secret. He’s asked me not to discuss it.”

  She hesitates, and I hear the short sound of her breath on the other end of the line. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she finally says. She doesn’t say anything for a moment. “You know you can always give the job up, move back in with us.”

  “I like my job,” I say. And also, now, I cannot imagine not seeing Joshua every day. I tell you as a friend, Margie, he’d said to me. A friend.

  “Well, at the very least, you’ll come for dinner tomorrow,” she says. “We haven’t seen you in a while. We worry about you. Are you eating?”

  “Of course I’m eating,” I lie.

  “Well, good,” she says. “Tomorrow night. Bertram will drive over to pick you up so you don’t have to take the bus.”

  I agree, we hang up, and my phone doesn’t ring again that night.

  The next night, Ilsa’s husband, Bertram, pulls up outside the sidewalk by my apartment building in his blue Ford Fairlane. He honks once, and I walk outside to find him waiting for me in the car. He is a tall, quiet man, who hides his face behind a thick copper beard and mustache.

  “Margie,” he says, after I slip into the passenger seat. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yes.” I nod. “It has.”

  “Are you well?” he asks.

  I nod. “And you?”

  “Fine,” he says.

  We don’t talk anymore as he drives us slowly toward the home he shares with Ilsa in Levittown, Pennsylvania, United States of America. But it is not because Bertram and I don’t get along; it is because Bertram is a quiet man, and also because I think he is used to being with Ilsa, who talks so very much that it’s possible he now has nothing left to say.

  Ilsa and Bertram live on Oak Lane, in a quiet suburban neighborhood where all the houses—and the streets beginning with the letter O—look nearly identical. In fact you probably could not tell Ilsa’s house from all the others on the block from the outside alone, but on the inside, the house is uniquely decorated with Ilsa’s hand-sewn curtains and dolls.

  Ilsa is robust in every way that Bertram is not, and after the quiet ride, she greets me at the door to their familiar tract house with a hug, then pulls back and looks at me. “My dear,” she says, shaking her head, so her blond curls tumble against her shoulders. “You are too thin. Come in. Eat.”

  Even now, when I look at Ilsa, I see the face of the woman who came to pick me up in New York City, New York, just after my boat arrived. Eduard had shown me a picture of her, her wedding photo with Bertram. She was a tiny woman, nearly childlike in size next to Bertram, who is tall and a little burly. In the black-and-white photo all I could tell was that her hair was lighter than Bertram’s, and that her smile was enormous. In person, her hair is nearly the color of snow, and her smile, it is even bigger.

  That first time I saw her she was waiting for me at the New York Harbor, her tiny arms pushing through the crowd to get to me. Eduard had made sure I’d had a first-class ticket from Bremerhaven, so my experience in getting off the boat in America would be an easy one, so I would not be subject to poking and prodding and questioning at Ellis Island. After a cursory glance at me, my shoulder-length curls, the nice brown dress Eduard had purchased for me for just this occasion, the doctor had signed my paper, and I’d disembarked.

  It was warm, nearly summer, and there was a crowd. Mostly men, mostly in suits. The men in tattered clothes, I imagined, they waited at the exit from Ellis Island where the third-class passengers entered into America, if they were lucky.

  “Margot?” Ilsa said my name. I did not see her at first, amid all the men, but once I heard her voice, I turned, and there were her arms, pushing through the swarm of men. Her arms reached me, and she stared at me for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure it was really me, or perhaps she was wondering if she’d made a giant mistake in agreeing to sponsor me, to take me into her home.

  “Why would she even take me?” I had said to Eduard when he told me of her. “I am a perfect stranger.” Or more rightly so, an imperfect one.

  “I know my cousin,” Eduard had said. “She will take you. In fact, she will love you.”

  That first time I saw her, she put her arms on mine, and she said, for the first of many times, “My dear, you are so thin. You are flesh and bones. I will have to fix that, Margot.” She clung to me, and her high voice rose above the din of the crowd.

  “Margie,” I told her, when I found my voice. “Everybody calls me Margie.” Nobody had ever called me Margie, except for Peter. But I was in America. I was going to be Margie.

  “Okay then, Margie,” Ilsa said. “Come. Come with me, my dear. Let’s try to catch the train so we are home in time for dinner. I will fatten you up in no time.”

  In six years, not so very much has changed.

  “So,” Ilsa says as she cuts her meat loaf into delicate pieces and watches with the eyes of a hawk to see how much I am eating. “Tell me about this boss of yours who is making you take after-hours phone calls at your home.”

  I shrug and chew carefully. “He’s not making me do anything,” I say. “And he’s paying me seven dollars extra a week.”

  “A raise,” Bertram says, lifting his thick copper eyebrows. “Good for you, Margie.” That’s the nice thing about Bertram—when the time is right, he figures out the most decent thing to say. I smile at him.

  “Hmm,” Ilsa says as she tugs on her earlobe a little.

  “It’s really not a big deal,” I tell her. I feel so comfortable telling her this lie that it barely feels like a lie at all. “And besides, no one has even called yet aside from you.”

  She shakes her head. “Still,” she says. “I don’t like it. A woman living all alone in the city with her phone number published in the paper.”

  “Illie,” Bertram says, his voice hanging lightly on his pet name for his wife. “Margie is a big girl.”

  Ilsa smiles at me. “You know I only worry out of love, my dear.”

  “I know,” I say, and I do. Ilsa and Bertram were unable to ha
ve any children, and in a way, I suppose, I have helped her as much as she has helped me. She told me once that before I arrived, there were mornings when it was hard for her to get out of bed, and that once, in the bathtub, she put her head under the water and thought about not coming up. “What is one’s life if she doesn’t have a purpose?” Ilsa had asked me then.

  I’d nodded as if I’d understood, though really, what I understood was that American sorrows are so, so much different from my own.

  “Just don’t take any calls from men,” she tells me now. I nod, but she is still frowning. “And certainly, don’t give anyone your address.”

  “Of course not,” I say. “Now really, stop worrying.”

  She relents, for now, and we eat the rest of our dinner, making small talk. Bertram talks about his own job in the city, where he runs an accounting firm and Ilsa talks about the curtains she has decided to make for the bedroom: blue lace. Before I came—and after I left—this has been Ilsa’s purpose in life: decorating. I nod politely through the dinner, and in a way I miss this: family, dinnertime, easy conversations. In another way, I am very ready to leave by dessert. Quiet is my solace. And I am relieved when Ilsa begins to clear the dishes and Bertram grabs his hat.

  “Oh,” Ilsa says, wiping her hands on her blue-checkered apron as I am walking toward the front door. “I almost forgot. I was going to tell you that Bertie and I are planning a trip to Germany for some time next year.” I nod, though I do not like at all where this is going. “I would like to visit Eduard and show Bertie the city of my birth,” she says.

  “But Eduard is dead,” I say. He died of cancer, just before I began working at the law firm three years ago. Ilsa did not go to the funeral then because it was too far, too hard to get there. And I, well, I could never go back. Not even for Eduard.

  She nods. “But I would like to visit his grave. And it is getting cheaper and easier to travel overseas now. We could all take an airplane. It would be a grand adventure.” She smiles at me, revealing her tiny white teeth.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  She leans in and kisses my cheek. “Think about it,” she whispers in my ear. “Sometimes you can go home again, you know. The war has been over for many years, my dear.” She holds on to me tightly, gives my shoulder one last squeeze, and then, at last, she lets me go.

  As Bertram drives me back to my apartment in silence, I find myself staring at the darkness out the car window, imagining home again, and not even Frankfurt, but the Prinsengracht. There is a reason why I could not go home again. Why I did not. Why I do not, even now. It is the same reason why I cannot commit any words to paper to send to my father. Ilsa would never understand it, even if I tried to tell her. But then, she knows nothing of my sister. And perhaps, even if she did, she would not understand, with her purely American sensibilities. But there is another reason why I haven’t told her the entire truth. If I am being honest with myself, I know it is because I fear if she knows it, all of it, she will hate me.

  “Margie,” Bertram says with a nod when he pulls up by the sidewalk on Ludlow Street.

  “Thank you for the ride,” I tell him. “And please thank Ilsa again for the dinner.” He nods, opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it again.

  “What is it?” I ask him.

  He stares at me, hesitates for a moment, and then says, “You know, if you should ever need anything, Ilsa and I, we always want to help you . . .” His voice trails off, as if, suddenly, he is out of words again.

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course. Thank you, Bertram.”

  He nods and pats my shoulder in what is meant to be a sweet gesture, but comes off awkward instead. I smile at him and get out of the car, but for a moment, as I walk back into my apartment building, I wonder if Ilsa and Bertram are right. If, by myself, in this city, working on Joshua’s case, hiding, hiding, hiding, if by doing all this, I am somehow teetering on the brink of something terrible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  IT TAKES ME A LONG TIME TO FALL ASLEEP AFTER I RETURN home from Ilsa and Bertram’s. I lie there for hours in the darkness, thinking about Frankfurt, wondering if by now it has been put back together, the way it once was, before the war, and what Ilsa might see where I last saw broken glass and red swastikas. Then my thoughts turn to my father in Switzerland, and I wonder if he has as much trouble sleeping at night as I do. Do so many terrible memories still haunt him, or does he instead fall into an easy sleep brought on by thoughts of everybody reading the book? Perhaps his dreams are pleasant, bursting with the knowledge that because of him, the entire world knows my sister, loves her. Or thinks they do. But what of me? I wonder now. Does he ever still think of me, of the diary I kept? The life I once lived?

  When I finally do fall asleep, my night is filled with black and tumultuous dreams. In them, I replay a memory, the way I so often do. This time, I am lying on the parched earth. I am a sack of flesh and brittle bones in German-occupied Poland, not too far from the train tracks. I am too tired to run any longer; I expect to die, and I welcome it. And then, there is a hand on my shoulder.

  I squint and in my eyes there are only shadows, a nun’s coif, the sounds of German. But not Nazi German; her German has a softness that reminds me of when I was a little girl.

  “Steh auf, komm schnell.” Get up, come quickly. She’s whispering, in my ear. Or maybe she is shouting. My ears hurt and ring, and it is so hard to hear. “Komm mit mir bevor sie dich finden.” Come with me before they find you.

  I am so thirsty; I can’t move my mouth to speak or barely even breathe.

  She holds on to my arm, dragging me along, as if I am a sack of potatoes. My bare feet scrape against the ground, but I do not feel them being scratched. I feel nothing.

  Her black Beetle is parked off to the side of the road, and she opens the door and pushes the front seat forward, revealing the tiniest of spaces in the back. Her hands find my back and push me inside the car. “Runter, niedrige.” Get down, low. I crouch into a ball on the floor of the backseat.

  Only then can I get my lips to move. “Meine schwester?” I whisper. My sister?

  “Ja,” the nun says.

  “Meine schwester?” I whisper again.

  “Ich bin Schwester Brigitta,” the nun says. I am Sister Brigitta. She reaches down to touch my forearm, a bone with indelible ink, and then she whispers in my ear. “Ich werde dir nichts tun, Kind.”

  I will not hurt you, child.

  I wake up to the sound of a clock ringing, and I am sweating, German words echoing in my head: Meine schwester? Meine schwester?

  That morning was the closest I ever came to telling Brigitta about my sister and what happened to the two of us just before she found me that day. Brigitta hid me in the nunnery until the end of the war, and then let me stay for a while after I searched the Red Cross lists for my family . . . for Peter. But even at the very end, when she dropped me at Eduard’s in Frankfurt, I did not tell her the truth.

  I hear the sound again, and I wonder if I am still dreaming. It sounds like the alarm clock in Eduard’s guest room, and suddenly I see his face. After the war, when Brigitta dropped me on his doorstep, his face was warm and ebullient. Only now, in my half sleep, I see it shriveled from the effects of his cancer, and instead, he is Eduard the skeleton.

  I open my eyes, and I realize it is not a clock ringing at all, but the telephone in my apartment. The telephone. And it is still ringing. Over and over again. The clock on my nightstand reads 5:01 A.M.

  I get out of bed, put on my slippers, and fumble in the darkness to the other side of the room where the phone sits, on the counter by the icebox. “Hello.” I pick up, expecting Ilsa’s voice, saying, maybe, she is still worrying about me, or plotting to take me home with her, even in her dreams.

  “Hello,” a voice says. It is a man’s voice. And for a moment I think, Peter! I have found him, and he has found me. He knows about t
he movie too. Then the voice says, “I call number, from advertisement.” He speaks in broken English, in a voice I do not recognize, and I realize he is not Peter at all but a stranger who has gotten my number from Joshua’s ad.

  “Now?” I say, and I sigh.

  “Advertisement say between five and six only.”

  This man is clearly confused, as am I, in my half-sleep state. Though it is, in fact, between five and six. Joshua must not have specified P.M. Americans would assume this to be the case, but for a new immigrant, a factory worker, a man who is used to early mornings, perhaps the implication is lost. “Yes,” I finally say. “I guess it does.”

  “Advertisement say, Jews who work for Robertson’s unite against anti-Semitism,” the man says.

  “Yes.” I nod, and Ilsa’s words echo in my head. Do not talk to any men. I push the warning aside. There is no harm in merely talking to anyone, and Joshua has asked me for this much.

  “You are Jew?” the man asks me.

  I draw my breath in, because no one has ever asked me this, so directly, in my American life. “No,” I finally lie, and I explain to him about Joshua and Bryda Korzynski and the lawsuit.

  “Group litigation?” The words sound funny in his voice, as if he’s talking about a child’s game.

  “Yes,” I tell him, trying to make my voice sound reassuring. But it is hard, when you are half asleep, and when you are sweating because you sense that even through the phone, this man, like Bryda Korzynski, is enough like you to recognize your secret.

  “I don’t know,” he finally says. “I thought I just meet other people. Like me. America is lonely place, no?”