Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  I sigh and lean back against the couch, and run my hands across Katze’s warm orange fur. I want to know everything. I want to be able to understand everything, to decipher what is real and what is not. That is what I hate most about the aftermath of Hitler’s terrible regime, that everything that I have done and that has been done to me, I cannot recall it with the clarity in which I used to be able to recall school lessons. I had a photographic memory for trigonometry and Latin words, and yet there is a whole two-year period of my teenage life—maybe more—in which I find myself at a loss.

  The bare flesh of my arm burns into my blue velour couch, and I find myself turning my head to look at it now: my forearm. This is real, I think, the way I so often have. This is the only thing I have left from that time that is completely real. It is undisputable evidence of what was done to me, how much was taken, who and what I used to be, where I came from.

  I think about what Bryda said earlier, that she knew of a doctor who could remove my tattoo. But even if it would mean no more sweaters, no more hiding, I know I would never have it erased. It is really the only thing that remains of Margot. The only thing I know to be true.

  I stare at the numbers now, and it surprises me the way they are still so bold, the way they are still right there, thick dark ink. Nothing can’t mean something, Mother said.

  I think about that morning in the camp. September 1944. A month from the annex, from Peter, from the way my sister said his name as the men in green carried us out. What had she been saying then, really? Had it been an accusation or a fantasy? Had seeing us there ruined her story or her reality?

  Peter. Peter van Pels. Peter Pelt.

  I do not love him, my sister said. It is not love.

  She was angry with me that morning, when the Green Police came. She did not talk to me in the truck. Our parents thought her silence was born from fear. I knew better. Peter? The way she’d said his name, it was as if he’d betrayed her. We both had.

  But by the time we were dropped off the train in Auschwitz, nearly a month later, her anger had passed. We clung to each other that morning, waiting, waiting, waiting in line, as the Polish woman screamed over and over again, so loud I thought her voice might break me. Jestes diablem. Jestes diablem.

  “No,” I whispered to my sister then. “No, no, no.”

  “Shhh.” She clung to my hand. “Don’t listen to her, Margot. Sing something happy in your head. Imagine a beautiful place, the sea. Swimming in the North Sea with Mother and Father and you and me.” She did not mention Peter, not ever again, after the annex. At the camp, she was my sister, my protector, my savior, and I was hers. Everything else fell away.

  My hands trembled against hers as we watched the Polish woman, as they held her down, tattooed her. “She’s so brave,” my sister said.

  And now I can envision this moment a different way than I so often have envisioned it. In my head, this way feels just as true.

  Is it possible I did not push my sister behind me, to protect her, to have her watch that it was not so bad? Is it possible I trembled, like the coward I always was and most certainly always have been?

  “I cannot be brave,” I whispered to her. “I am not brave.”

  “Yes,” she told me. “You are.”

  She stepped in front of me in line, and held out her arm to the officer, and she did not scream or even flinch as the tattoo singed her flesh.

  I see it there now, on my forearm: thick dark ink. And I squeeze my eyes shut tightly, trying to picture it there on my sister’s arm. She was one number higher than me. She stood right behind me.

  Or was she one number lower than me? Had she stood right in front of me?

  I push my brain to remember, the way the ink looked on her forearm as she lay there on the dirty ground in the camp, as she clung to my arm on the train. What was her number?

  It has been so long, I cannot see it. All I can see are her almond eyes, the way they held me at the end on the train, begging me.

  Nothing can’t mean something, Mother said.

  But if she is right, then what I am left with now, it is nothing. It means nothing. It is almost as if Margot, she never even existed at all.

  Suddenly I notice the brewing darkness, and I push Katze from my lap and pull the Shabbat candle from beneath my kitchen sink. I set it on the counter, force the flame to rise and fall, and say my silent prayer.

  It’s not religion. It’s ritual.

  I could never be with someone who wasn’t Jewish, Joshua said.

  I stare at my candle, watch it burn and flicker brightly, as if it is taunting the gloaming.

  “But it is religion,” I say to myself, out loud, my words hanging there in the air.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  MONDAY MORNING I SLEEP LATE, AND IT IS A SURPRISE TO awake to a gentle summer breeze coming in through the slightly open window, blowing past the pale blue curtains Ilsa sewed for me just after I moved in here. The numbers on the clock read 9:17, but I have not slept well, my body, my brain, restless and tumbling. In my dreams, baby Eleanor was crying for her father. Though not Peter, I thought as I awoke. Bellwether.

  I wonder what has transpired during Joshua’s weekend in Margate. Perhaps he has even asked Penny to marry him, and she will parade into the office this morning wanting to shove her diamond in my face. She and Shelby, they may even share a laugh and some bride’s notes, should Penny deem it acceptable to behave in such a way with the girls in the office. Though I venture to say she will. That nothing will dampen the good mood that a diamond from Joshua will put her in.

  I groan and pull the pillow over my head, willing sleep to find me again. But I know it will not. And though I have not decided, consciously, not to go to work today, I do not move to dress and get ready, and I know that I cannot go in. That I cannot face even the possibility of Penny and her diamond.

  Instead I get out of bed, pick up the phone, and dial Ilsa’s number.

  “My dear,” she says, upon hearing my voice. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  It’s possible she can hear the way I’m breaking, just from my tone as I have said her name. Or it could be because she always seems to be so worried about me.

  “I think I quit my job,” I say. And Peter’s dead, I add to myself, in my head. And I have nothing, no hope, left anymore. Not even Joshua.

  “Oh,” she says, and the word is weighted, as if she understands there is more there than just a job. I wonder if she was able to intuit this much from our recent dinner, or if it is just a guess on her part, right now. “Well,” she says, “I’m coming into the city, then. We’ll have a girls’ day today.”

  “I don’t know if I’m up for it,” I say.

  “I’ll be there in an hour, my dear. Bertie is off today, and I’ll have him drop me at your place.”

  Then she hangs up, before I have any time to convince her otherwise.

  I sit there for a few moments, still holding the phone in my hand, wondering if Joshua might call to ask me when I will be in and why I am not at my desk. But then I suspect he won’t. I could never be with someone who wasn’t a Jew, he said. And didn’t that change everything? That he said it, what everyone else had already seen, that there was something else between us, more than just boss and secretary, but that whatever that something was, it was never going to turn into more.

  I think about Mother and Eduard, and I wonder what their life might have been like together once. If they shared a passion or if they held themselves back. But that was different, anyway. Eduard really truly was not a Jew. Margie Franklin, though, she is just a lie.

  I look at the number on my arm again, trace the digits with my finger. And then I go and dress in my green dress and pink sweater.

  Bertram honks the horn once as he pulls his Fairlane up by the sidewalk on Ludlow Street, and I watch out the window as Ilsa climbs out of the car. Her petite frame is wrap
ped in a deep green sundress, which I know will bring out the color of her eyes, when I am standing closer.

  I lock my apartment and walk outside to meet her, and as Bertram honks again, waves in my direction, and drives away, Ilsa wraps her tiny arms around me. “Oh, my dear,” she says. “Let’s walk to Wanamaker’s and look for some nice summer dresses, shall we?”

  I nod, and let her cling to my arm, the way Shelby always does. But in a way, I feel safer holding on to Ilsa. I am suddenly sad for her, that she could never have a baby, because she would’ve been the best kind of mother, fierce and smart and beautiful and protective, and always, always with a plan. Not so dissimilar from my own mother.

  “So are you going to tell me what happened?” Ilsa asks as our heels click in step against the sidewalk.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Margie.” Her voice is kind and stern all at once.

  “My boss,” I finally say, because there is no way I can tell her about P. Pelt. And now I am beginning to understand, that maybe this is really what it has been about these past few months. Not Peter, but Joshua. Who have I really been thinking about as Shelby’s love songs have played on her Friday afternoon radio? Who have I been watching through the glass, waiting for the moments when he says my name?

  “Yes,” Ilsa says. “What about him?”

  “He wants me to do things I cannot,” I tell her.

  She stops walking, turns to me and frowns. “What kind of things?” she asks.

  “Help him defend murderers,” I say, but what I am really thinking is, Watch him marry a woman he doesn’t love. Watch her walk in every afternoon gloating that she is his wife.

  She tsks and shakes her head, and we start walking again. “I am surprised he cannot be more sensitive, after all you have been through.”

  “He doesn’t know,” I say softly. “He doesn’t even know I’m Jewish.”

  “Oh, my dear,” she says, shaking her head again.

  We turn the corner, and we are up the street now from the cinema. The red letters are still there, blinding me, on the marquee, and I wonder how long they will remain. Is this the longest-playing movie ever in the city of Philadelphia? Surely, it only feels that way to me. I look away, not wanting to see them again. My sister’s name against the bright white light of late morning, the way the letters appear in red, in the movie’s title, they are nothing at all like my sister, the way she was as a person, not some silly, nearly invented icon.

  “Have you seen it?” Ilsa asks as we pass by.

  “What?” I ask, playing dumb. Only this never works with Ilsa. She nods her head in the direction of the marquee. “Oh, that,” I say. “Yes, of course. Hasn’t everybody?” I cannot keep the bitterness from my voice. It is so sharp, so biting that it almost surprises me. Oh, the lies.

  “I wasn’t sure if you would have,” she says slowly, as if she is treading water with her voice. “Did you like it?”

  I remember what Joshua said, sitting there, so very close to me on the stool in O’Malley’s bar. It’s not something you can like, is it? Like school. Or the doctor’s. I sigh. “I don’t know, Ilsa,” I say. “Let’s not talk about this now.”

  Ilsa shrugs, but in true Ilsa fashion, continues to talk about it. “I saw it,” she says. I nod. Of course she did. Everyone has. The entire world. “It was beautiful, in a way. Only very sad. I kept thinking of you.”

  She stops walking, and she turns and takes my hands in her own. She rubs my fingers between hers, as if she is warming them. “That was you, wasn’t it, my dear?” she asks me. I am so surprised by her words, by the easy way she says them, that all I can do is shake my head, back and forth and back and forth. My brain feels numb, and yet my head aches. How could Ilsa say this? Just like that. How could she know?

  My heart pounds in my chest, and I am sweating, pools of water building down my arms, swallowing my ink. “No,” I whisper. “No.”

  “Eduard told me, when he first wrote me about you, that your name was Margot Frank.”

  “No,” I whisper again, but it is so strange to hear it, someone say it aloud. Margot Frank. Someone whom I know and whom I even love saying those words. I have not heard them spoken out loud in so long that they cannot be real. It feels like a stranger’s name, or the name of someone I once knew, long ago, but whom I can barely remember.

  “But then you arrived and said your name was Margie Franklin,” she is saying now. “And I thought you were Americanizing yourself, the way we all have when we have come to this country. I thought nothing more of it. I never got a chance to read the book. But recently, after Bertie and I saw the movie . . . And then lately, the way you have seemed so on edge, the way you just reacted when you saw the marquee. My dear . . .” She puts her hand to my cheek and turns my face toward her. Her green eyes are filled with kindness and sadness.

  “Ilsa,” I whisper. “I am not the person you think I am.”

  “I understand that,” she says. She reaches for my cheek again and strokes my hair back gently, the way a mother might do to a very small child.

  “No,” I say. “You don’t. I am not her.” Because this is the truth, I am nothing like the girl she saw in the movie. She is only a character, the boring fictional sister of an icon. Nothing about it seems real to me, except that we were Jews, and we were hiding.

  “Okay, my dear.” She pauses for a moment. “I do not know what happened to you then. But I love you now. In my heart you are the child that I never had. I worry about you.” She pauses again. “I want to help you,” she says. “And if you are her, well, then your father is still alive, isn’t he? He is living in Switzerland, yes?” It occurs to me that this was maybe the real reason for the invitation to join her and Bertram on their trip. You can go home again, she’d said. I’ve always wanted to see the Alps.

  No. No. No.

  “You don’t understand,” I whisper.

  “You are afraid,” Ilsa says.

  “I’m the reason she’s not here,” I whisper.

  Ilsa frowns, confused. “Who?” she asks.

  “My sister,” I say. “I killed her.”

  And now that I have said it out loud, finally, at last, the truth, I feel my hands shaking against the weight of Ilsa’s, and then I am not sure I can stand any longer.

  Ilsa leads me to a bench, on the sidewalk by South Seventeenth Street. We are not too far from Casteel’s, and I cannot help but think of that other morning, when Joshua found me and led me gently inside. Where we shared a meal together. And where Joshua pretended that he was mine and I was his.

  “Tell me everything,” Ilsa says now, when we are both sitting. Her voice is calm but stern, and her green eyes, they pierce me, until the whole story comes out of me, all of it. I tell her about Peter, and about the way my sister said his name, just before the Green Police stormed the annex. I tell her about the line at the camp, how I cannot remember now my sister’s number. And then I tell her about my mother’s plan, the train taking us from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, when I escaped the Nazis.

  “We were lumped in a cattle car,” I tell Ilsa, and the words tumble from me now as if I am in a trance, describing a nightmare I have relived over and over and over again, and yet have never spoken of before this moment. “With so many women. Every one of us was just a heap of bone and loose flesh. It was hard to tell whether anyone was dead or alive, unless they happened to move a limb or twitch an eyelid.”

  Ilsa shudders, but then motions for me to keep on talking.

  “The train started moving slowly, and we were by the door. I was holding on tightly to my sister’s hand, and I saw our old neighbor, Schmidt, guarding our car. My mother had promised he wouldn’t shoot me. And then I knew I had to jump, or the train would be moving too fast, and then it would be too late. I couldn’t stay on the train any longer.”

  “And then what happened?” Ilsa asks, her eyes
the size of silver dollars.

  “I jumped,” I say. “I let go of my sister’s hand, and I jumped. There were gunshots. And screaming . . . And that is all I remember until the next morning, when I woke up on the ground not too far from the train tracks.”

  I close my eyes, and I am imagining that morning again, the feel of Brigitta’s hand on my shoulder, her German whisper in my ear. I could not hear her at first because the sound of gunshots and my sister’s screams, they were ringing so loudly in my ears. But I had not been shot. And I had not taken her with me. I’d let go of her hand; I’d left her there to die, to take Schmidt’s bullets for me.

  “Oh, my dear.” Ilsa wipes at the tears on my face with her thumbs, then wipes at tears on her own face. “It is so heavy to be you, to carry all of this around, for so long.” She pauses. “I do not believe you killed your sister,” she says. “I do not believe that even for a moment.”

  “That’s because you are you,” I tell her. “And you believe the best in people.” In this way Ilsa, she is not so dissimilar from my sister. But Ilsa was not there. During the war. Then, anyone was capable of anything.

  She is shaking her head now. “You are telling me that maybe your sister was telling stories about her and Peter. But what of herself? Was she strong and full of life and courageous as the movie suggests?”

  I nod. “Yes,” I say. You are such a paragon of virtue, I hear her saying in my head, laughing, chewing on the end of her fountain pen.

  “And you say you cannot actually remember those last few moments on the train?” Ilsa asks.

  I shake my head.

  She thinks about it for a moment, and then she takes her hand in mine. “My dear,” she says, “I want to tell you a story . . .”