Of course, just as she said, my mother recovered and returned to her old self. That first smile she had bestowed upon me quickly faded as she healed and gained strength. As far as I could tell, her illness didn’t teach her anything. Her recovery was remarkable, given the extent of the surgery. I’m convinced that it was the adrenalin produced by her untethered anger, and her fierceness about living, that helped her heal. And within a week of feeling better, she dyed her hair black.
I was kept busy covering the war for the New York Courier. Wherever I could, I would silently slip over the lines of a country’s frontier to discover and report on something new.
“Why don’t you live with me?” my mother asked. “After all, you’re hardly here and it’s silly for you to waste money on hotel rooms.”
‘Thanks, Ma, but that won’t work. When I’m back in London, I’ll try to stay in a hotel close to where you live.’ There was nothing under the sun that could convince me that I should live with my mother.
At that time, in 1942, I couldn’t believe her offer. Today I can. Because of her illness, she had crossed over into the specific world of the elderly. She was still angry. It was obvious that I continued to make her uneasy. Yet surviving her illness with such vigor offered her new hope. She grabbed onto life with all her might—setting up her studio—drawing English gardens as if there were no war. She also threw herself into the world of air raids and fires and bombs and human suffering. Sharing the job of block warden with an elderly gentleman, she reached out of herself into a besieged community. There was something about her—something that I had never been able to fully admit to. She liked people and they liked her. And although she had this true talent for relating to people, she was dismal in her ability to relate either to me or to our family in New York.
I had an unspoken peace treaty with her. Through the war, and seeing her so often in London, I treaded delicately—stepping over cracks that could bring back angry memories. Those horrible war years became far more important than our personal war. A perspective was found. We got used to each other.
I realize now that I’m feeling a bit helpless in my old age. But I’ve always been helpless. We all are. I first glimpsed that concept in my mother. As she grew older and became infirm, she became vulnerable and dependent. This made her furious. As a result of observing her, I’m trying to be the opposite—trying to see age in all its beauty and wisdom. After all, I am sitting on this lovely patch of land, my land, holding a glass of cool delicious white wine that I poured for myself—having made my own decision to sit and look out at the world from my own porch. What could be better?
I’m fortunate. I don’t feel empty in my isolation. I don’t have to be in a herd of people to find satisfaction. But my mother did. She could never find humility in her situation—she was too angry. But she continued to have a sparkle of cynical, even sardonic, humor that people enjoyed and appreciated. I never became accustomed to her kind of humor, though. I always felt that she was showing off.
“When the war’s over,” she told me, “I’m going back to the United States.”
“To Nevada?” I said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I still own the house—I hope it hasn’t burned down or been completely vandalized. Or maybe to New York. But I don’t know if I have the bravery for that big a change anymore.”
“Ma, in three years’ time, you came to Paris, were chased out of Berlin, escaped to Lisbon, found your way to London, recovered from a serious illness—and you say that you’re not brave!”
We were huddled in a bomb shelter. The all-clear siren had gone off. The noise of bombs and the shooting of heavy artillery had ceased. It was so very quiet. No one spoke aloud. We all whispered.
“I think,” she said, “that we’re all being pounded to a pulp by this anxiety, this horrific noise. If I were to draw a self-portrait, I’d be covered with highways of nerves that ended at exploding brick walls; you know, Rose, the kind you see in comic books with big yellow flames and black typography screaming,” and she raised her voice, “Boom! Wham! I feel as if I’m living under a constant barrage of fear. Even though it’s monotonous, cowboy Nevada appeals to me now.”
But after the war, she didn’t go home to Nevada. She moved close to me in New York City, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. At first, I rarely saw her. Between my traveling and writing, and her busy life, we had little time to get into trouble with each other.
Then my Aunt Clara died. Over the years she had descended further and further into depression. I still can’t understand why the intensity of Stella’s death had not been at least a little healed, a little faded with time. But Clara appeared to grip her feelings of guilt with extravagant honor. Now, I suspect that Clara was being heroic in her determination to live at all. But I was hoping over time that her innate heroism would give her the will to continue on in her natural, positive way. After all, she used to declare: “My dear Rosie, we are a family of survivors. We always puzzle things out.”
Together, my mother and I went to Leah’s home in Brooklyn. Clara had left instructions. No service. No religion. No graveyard. No mention of God. Our time of saying good-bye was no more than a moment’s sigh.
I still cherish the pin that Clara gave me with the painting of the young lovers. No matter how hard I try to imagine, I can’t see those two lovely people being transformed into Leon and me. First of all, we’re too dark. That couple is ivory white with yellow ringlets and soft pink patches on their full cheeks. We are dark people, sallow complexioned, dark rings under our even darker eyes. I have a very old sepia photograph of fourteen members of my family in Russia. In the photo they look like a band of tiny monkeys. They are all sitting or leaning on one another. It is a striking group, to be sure. Not quite real. Every one of them is painfully thin, and has black hair and large black eyes bridged by black eyebrows. They look as if they know what is going to happen to them.
They are all dead. During World War II, they were taken en masse from their village to a hand-shoveled pit on the plains. Forced to form a circle at the rim of the tomb, like perching blackbirds, they were murdered in cold blood.
Now my mother was left with one sister, Leah, her least favorite. Just deserts, I mused. And it got even more complex: When my mother was seventy-three, she was struck with another bout of cancer. I was living in Paris for the year, writing another book. Leah sent a telegram in her inimitably negative style: COME HOME STOP MIRIAM DYING.
I was with my mother for the last two weeks of her life. The first week, she was angry and uncomfortable. No matter what I did for her, it wasn’t right. Sometimes she would scream at me to let her alone and just let her die, right then and there. “My life,” she said to me one night, “my life, what a joke.”
“But, Ma,” I protested, “you’ve had an amazing life. You’ve been lauded for your work, you had a wonderful husband, you’ve traveled—you have many friends. What more would you want?”
She flicked my words back into my face. “Gornisht,” nothing, she said in Yiddish. “My life has been nothing.”
And from that moment, she spoke only in Yiddish. When I would respond in English, she said, “Red tsu mir yidish!” Speak Yiddish with me! So I spoke everyday German, which satisfied her.
Thanks to the morphine, the second week was calmer. We chatted, she in Yiddish, I in German. We listened to Beethoven. She requested that I read her Mark Twain’s essay “English as She Is Taught.” “Leyn es for af yidish!” “Read it in Yiddish!” she commanded. I translated it into German and she didn’t seem to mind.
I waited. Never was there a word of apology. And I waited. Never was there a word of love.
A few times I tried to talk to her about my feelings. I thought we could have our final round. I suppose I was hoping for redemption, for forgiveness. “Gey redn tsu der vant,” she said. Go talk to the wall. My mother appeared to be satisfied with the status quo.
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Time moved slowly.
One tempestuous rainy afternoon, she died with a smile on her face.
I still dream about that smile.
Was it for me?
Night’s arriving and I’m still sitting on the porch. Not hungry. It’s been an overwhelming day of memories. I’m exhausted. But I know that I must push on and finish what I started this morning.
It’s time to remember Leon.
Losing him was a laceration that has never healed. But I’ll try to remember all that I can. Then, I promise myself, the self-pity, the lingering anger, must finally cease. I’m too old to be mooning over love. I need to accept and celebrate my life as it is. I don’t want to die like my mother, miserable with her time on earth. I must accept that I will dream alone.
I wonder if elderly people want to learn the truth? Or is the torment of self-discovery too heavy for an old person’s back to bear? Do we bat it away with our gnarled fingers, not wanting perception, simply wanting peace of mind, the absence of anxiety?
* * *
The war was over and all the world could see the catastrophic debris. Even for me, a hardened journalist, what I was seeing was almost too excruciating for words. I think it will take generations of artists to distill and create the sounds, the odors, the emotional and physical sights that were discovered when the maze of barbed wire around Europe was hacked open.
I easily gained access to the camps and refugee centers. There were no words to describe what I saw. But I had to try. I understood that if I didn’t put it down on paper, the horror would coagulate in my mind and heart. And it could drive me mad. It was at that moment that my style of writing changed yet again. My fury was crushing. My disgust with humanity threw me into a cesspool of confusion. I tried writing in my normal style, but nothing I put on paper could describe what I was seeing. Without being aware of what I was doing, I began to distill my words to a staccato rhythm. My editors complained that I wasn’t fulfilling the necessary word count for my column. I told them, “Too bad.”
Of course, Leon was on my mind. But there was not to be an enchanted ending. I would not find him in a refugee camp. There would be no grand and romantic cinematic embrace. No, I would not hold his hand as he was recovering in a crisp and clean white hospital bed. I searched. I couldn’t find him. I had to assume that he was dead. I returned to America.
In 1961, Berlin was divided. Each day, more and more of the wall was built around human beings penned in by the mighty, self-proclaimed judges—the judges who were supposed to make their lives better.
Years went by. The dream of Leon continued to live with me—not starkly, but like a rose-colored mist. After I returned to America, I commissioned an artist to paint Leon’s portrait from my memory. The portrait’s small, about twelve inches square. It’s painted in sepia and Van Dyke brown with highlights of the same sepia, but muted. His wonderful face is hanging above my desk. I’m in the habit of wishing him Guten Morgen before I begin to work—and Gute Nacht before I go upstairs to bed.
* * *
When the Moses family moved back to the States, they settled in Harlem. It was obvious to both Daria and Richard that the children needed to be in a safe environment and around family. And Richard’s family was pleased to welcome them all home.
Richard didn’t have to join the army. He began playing saxophone for some of the big bands, and gigs in jazz joints. Daria went back to school and earned her teaching degree. Soon she was teaching in the public school system. Between the two of them they were managing to make a good living. The problem was Annelie. She rarely lifted herself out of depression. She wasn’t aggressive, or unloving–but she couldn’t find light in her life. She tried religion. She tried singing with a choir. Nothing worked. Her parents sent her to therapists, sent her to after-school drama programs, to violin lessons–and she tried. Indeed, she was brave.
But some essential part of Annelie’s being was forever broken when the Nazis sliced away her femaleness. They rendered her neuter to make their lily-white men safe from temptation.
One early morning, a phone call came. It jangled me out of my sleep—it demolished my complacency. Annelie had flown out her tenth-floor bedroom window onto the earth of 128th Street.
The family was devastated, but not surprised. Like millions of people in the world of war, they had been struggling to heal their wounds.
I was always moved by how Daria had kept her family in a steady and warm embrace. After Annelie died, she labored to fill the empty space. She, with Richard’s blessing, took in foster children. She became more involved in the neighborhood. Once, she complained to me, “I have a terrible singing voice. But if I could sing like Annelie, I would be in her gospel choir. Then I could hold her close to me for the length of the song.”
But she failed. Less then two years later, Daria was dead of uterine cancer.
I’ve always experienced a wild joy at brutal weather. I remember Nevada. The vast horizon—the churning, heavy-bellied clouds—my anticipation of a torrential rainstorm. It still gives me goose bumps. But the thunderous weather of death is different. If you’re not careful, you could be swept away to nowhere.
Neither Richard nor Coleman could ever find enough peace to carry on their lives in the way that they had dreamed. They tried the best they could. They became an odd couple. Richard was a tall, although stooping, very dark brown man. Coleman was short, and as pink as his mother. They lived together in the same apartment in Harlem for many years. Coleman hasn’t married yet, although I sense his time is coming. I think he’s waiting to fall in love with a woman who is too old to have children.
Richard never remarried. Quietly, even peacefully, he died at the age of seventy-five.
“At least he didn’t die tragically,” Coleman said to me. “That was his gift to me, I believe.”
In 1989, I returned to a liberated Berlin. It was to be my last assignment in Europe. I wanted to stay at the old Hotel Aldon and sit at the bar where Leon and I had sat. I wanted to see the room where the Press Ball was held each year, and where we journalists huddled together at the end, waiting to receive word that we were being expelled by the Reich. There was such an aura about the hotel; it had been a haven for international journalists, for foreign spies, for questionable and shady trade delegations. We correspondents always thought of it as the cloak-and-dagger heart of Berlin. It was three doors down from the Russian embassy and rubbing elbows with the British embassy. But, alas, the hotel was gone, destroyed by a fire in 1945. No one had told me about it, nor had I read anything. I was booked into the new Hotel Hansablick, also near the Brandenburg Gate.
A clever American journalist had researched and found that I had turned eighty-three on the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a result, a big brouhaha was being made about my prewar German stories. I now had the reputation of being both a good writer and colorfully cantankerous. Reporters interviewed me. I thought this hilarious.
The first interviewer was a woman reporter from the Times. “How does it feel to be so old?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I think of myself as still young. I’m often surprised when I pass by a shop window and see an old gray-haired lady. I always wonder who ‘that woman’ is!”
She smiled.
“What do you do with your spare time?” she asked, pencil poised above her pad.
She most likely thinks, I thought, that I lie around and watch television.
“Well,” I said, “when I’ve listened to the emptiness for too long, I take off my shoes, put on sad country western music, and dance around my kitchen table.”
That created a sensation among my peers. The headline on the reporter’s story read: Jazzy R. B. Manon Dances the Blues.
As soon as I had arrived in Berlin I began to look for Leon. The East Berlin Jewish community was minuscule, and I decided to begin my search there. A young reporter,
Jake Stein, from the New York Courier had accompanied me. Once we got settled, and our assignments booked, I sent him to the Rykerstrasse Synagogue. Since 1950, the synagogue had been the center of activity for the remnants of Berlin’s religious and secular Jewish community. I asked him to try to find Leon.
I remember how my heart pounded, how I had to hang on to the table, when I read the note that Jake had slipped under my door: Leon Wolff, metal engraver, is listed at Nürnbergestrasse 42, but has no phone number. Hope this helps, Jake.
He was alive!
Not able to bear the idea that I wouldn’t see him, I sent a command by messenger. Dear Leon, is it really you? Meet me this evening at 8:00 in the lounge of the Hotel Hansablick on Flotowstrasse. Please. Rosie.
I dressed carefully. Smoothed down my short, still-thick gray (I prefer to call it silver) hair, and put on mascara and lipstick. I didn’t want to look too fancy, nor too newswomanly (meaning a tailored suit). Wearing a pair of black loose cotton trousers and a red-and-orange patterned Indian-cotton shirt that hid my skin-sagging arms and covered my wrinkled cleavage, I timed my entrance. At three minutes past nine I walked out of the elevator and turned right into the lounge. He wasn’t there. And when I saw the old woman, I knew she was Leon’s emissary.
She was dressed shabbily, in what some reporters called East Berlin chic. Wearing a nondescript black skirt and faded blue cotton blouse, she had on thick nylons and run-down, sensible shoes. Her white hair was pulled back in a chignon. Her face was very wrinkled—grooves of worry, of a hard life, I imagined. But she was beautiful, sitting straight as an arrow, hands elegantly folded on her lap. All I could think was that I should let my hair grow.
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