Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  Your grandmother laughs. “I picked a nice time to visit.”

  The girls want vanilla ice cream in waffle cones. Alexandra’s seven, a chatty girl with olive skin and dark hair, like Gak, and Darya’s three, a quiet blond beauty like her mother. Walking by the river and watching them with their ice cream cheers us up, and Emma sends a telegram to Gak in Nice, saying she and the girls are safe, he shouldn’t worry. The only way Gak ain’t worrying is if he don’t own a radio or read newspapers, because every day the news gets worse. In a couple weeks, half a million of our soldiers killed, a million captured, and rumors of the Nazis rounding up Jews. Maria’s a ball of energy; she’ll quote Marx till you and her go blue in the face; and she’s out digging trenches around the city. The trenches don’t stop the Germans. That fall, they take Rostov and hunt Jews. Don’t catch many. Emma, the girls, and me hide in the attic of the Adaskins’ house. I slip aside a loose brick in the wall and see Germans removing couches, bed frames, and crates of dishes and candlesticks from houses. A woman in a black uniform and jackboots directs them to the trucks, a pretty, young woman with long reddish-brown hair, and she’s writing on a pad. The bunch of thieves steal a grandfather clock from the Adaskins’ parlor, while me and Emma are in the attic with our hands over the girls’ mouths.

  The Red Army counterattacks, and a week later the Wehrmacht retreats. But we ain’t seen Maria. From a steamer trunk, Emma takes out this pistol.

  “That’s a German Luger,” I say.

  “Swiss. My father imported them for a year and kept one for himself.”

  “Where you going with it?” I ask.

  “To find Maria.”

  “Are you crazy? The Nazis might be—”

  “Take care of my girls, Bashe.”

  That evening your grandmother returns a different woman. The Nazis hanged Maria, who shot a soldier with his own gun when he tried to rape her. The anger in Emma I can see—she had to cut her sister off a telegraph pole. But Emma was one of those kindhearted, soft-talking beauties people adore; being near her was like sitting by a fire on a snowy night. Now her warmth is gone. I don’t begin to understand it till we bury Maria in the Old Jewish Cemetery. Maria’s fiancé—Der Schmuggler, who ain’t started his smuggling yet—is there, and tells me Emma saved him. He was searching for Maria and a retreating German soldier was about to shoot him when Emma shot the soldier.

  Your grandmother don’t say nothing about it. I’ll tell you what, though. From then on, her Luger is nearby, and I’m feeling like she’d gladly use it again.

  We wait out the war in Rostov. Alexandra goes to school, Darya plays with other children. Food can be scarce, but Emma and me got some money, and your grandmother’s a wizard at the stove. On the radio, the news is bad and good and very bad by July of 1942. The Germans are heading back to Rostov. People flee, people hide. Emma and me think maybe we run into the Ukraine, but the Germans are there, and the Ukrainians been busy hating and killing Jews for eight hundred years, and Stalin starved millions of their peasants, so the Nazis got Cossacks fighting for them, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police hunting Jews.

  Meantime, your grandmother comes up with a plan. Her father owned a cottage outside the city. On a wooded hill. An old farmer down the road looks after it, milks the cow, feeds the chickens. Maria and her young Communist friends would use the place to play peasant, take nature hikes, and recite Lenin. We go to the cottage, and in less than a week, Rostov is in flames. We hear the planes bombing and the shelling, and at night the fires in the sky are brighter than the moon. Emma and me tell ourselves we’re safe. That don’t last long.

  One morning we hear trucks. Emma’s father was a bird watcher, and we take his binoculars and go behind the trees on the hill. Less than a kilometer away, men in their shorts stand along the Ravine of Snakes. German soldiers start firing, and the men fall into the ravine. Other men—thousands of them—are lining up as if they’re at a train station. They move to the edge of the ravine and are shot. Other soldiers open the back doors of the trucks—panel trucks, like big vans. They drag out women and children. As limp as rag dolls. Dead. I almost vomit and give your grandmother the binoculars.

  Emma looks. “The gas-truck rumors are true. We have to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Ukraine, Byelorussia, just not here.”

  There are two rucksacks and canteens at the cottage, probably left there by Maria’s hiker comrades. We pack up and go, but we don’t get far. Leaving a wheat field, we walk right into some Nazis having a picnic. One soldier aims a Maschinenpistole at us—one of those metal submachine guns you probably seen in the movies. But the other soldiers are smiling and waving at Alexandra and Darya. A tall, thin man in a jeep, obviously an officer, puts down his mess kit and bottle of wine and comes over.

  And here’s where we get a break. My grandparents on both sides were born in Germany before moving to Odessa and then Rostov. My parents spoke German. It was my first language, and I studied German and Yiddish literature at university in Moscow. I was a teacher before my marriage. So when the Nazi officer asks, in bad Russian, if we are Jews, I answer in perfect German, “Useful Jews. My name is Bashe, and I can translate from Russian and Ukrainian, and my friend, Emma, is a cook and a nurse.”

  Your grandmother ain’t no nurse, but I guess the Nazis must need some.

  The officer asks, “Can you write in German?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does your friend cook?”

  “If you can eat it, Emma can cook it.”

  He grinned. His teeth were crooked, and his eyes slightly crossed. “I am Lieutenant Colonel Ter Horst. Before the war, I was a chef and owned a restaurant. You will eat with us and then we will go.”

  I explain everything to your grandmother. And pray she don’t pull out her Luger. I seen her wrap it in a sweater and put it in the bottom of her rucksack. I have a few packs of Belomorkanal cigarettes and pass them out to the soldiers. After the picnic they take us to the trucks. No doors on back, so we ain’t getting gassed. At sunset, the trucks pull over. The soldiers get out and let us sleep in the truck. By dawn, we’re going again.

  I don’t forget that ride. Hours and hours in the heat and the dust, with Alexandra and Darya on our laps. We stroke their hair, kiss their heads. Anything so they’re quiet—we don’t want the soldiers hearing them speak Russian. The soldiers watch us. Teenage boys, a lot of them, nice boys you think. One boy, with a sweet face and shy smile, gives us tins of meat and crackers, and when we stop for the soldiers to piss, he nods for us to go behind bushes. A considerate boy. We shouldn’t be scared. Except we’re going west across the Ukraine, and the Nazis had been through. Boys the same as the ones in the truck. The farmhouses and barns are blackened skeletons, and women and children lie dead on the ground. They were lucky. Shot instead of burned alive. The boy who gives us food stands up with a movie camera. A film to show Mama and Papa when he gets home.

  Then I seen it. A field of sunflowers like a sea of melted gold. On the other side of the sea, between fruit orchards and a woodland, a gray stone palace with a reddish-orange roof and more windows, turrets, and chimneys than I can count. Alexandra and Darya get excited and start pointing, “Mamochka, Mamochka.” Emma and me shush them because maybe even “Mommy” in Russian can anger the soldiers. Lucky us, the soldiers are distracted, talking about the glückliche Haus. I think the Happy House is how they call the palace, but after the trucks turn up a road, the soldiers jump out and hurry to a low log building with a line outside.

  “What are they waiting for?” I ask your grandmother after we and the girls are out of the truck.

  Emma snickers. “What men always wait for.”

  From the left Joost Ter Horst comes toward us; from the right, a woman, the same woman I seen in Rostov supervising the looting. Joost dresses in the same grayish-green as the soldiers. The woman and four men strutting behind her with their Maschinenpistolen wear black uniforms with SS on the collars, the men in those wedge caps
and the woman in a billed hat with a death’s-head above the bill. Like on a bottle of poison. She has auburn hair twisted in a long pigtail, a face as pale and flawless as a cameo, and dollars to doughnuts, her uniform had visited a tailor. It shows off what she got, and she got plenty. Emma and me, we’re scared and trying not to laugh, because the soldiers behind the woman glue their eyes to her backside.

  “This is Frau Ter Horst,” Joost says when he and the woman reach us.

  Later, I find out she don’t have no official rank and the uniform is a costume to her. Nobody dares give her trouble about it; her husband’s a lieutenant colonel; her father’s friends with Himmler and Hitler; and she likes taking her clothes on and off—I’ll get to that. So your grandmother and me are there with the girls, the four SS soldiers glaring in our direction like blue-eyed vipers, and Frau Ter Horst ignores us and asks Joost, “The map I made of the Jew neighborhoods in Rostov, it was helpful to you and the Einsatzkommandos?”

  Those were the bastards who did the killing at the ravine, and Joost, he frowns when Hildegard asks him the question and says, “I told you we would not need your map. And I was correct. By my account, this was our most productive day yet in Russia. Over twenty thousand.”

  “Joost, I worked hard on that map.”

  She may have been a hot number, but her husband is looking at her like she’s dried-up herring. Hildegard pouts, then glances at Alexandra. She’s the dark one, Hildegard’s got a sour expression on her face, disgusted, as if Alexandra is a mouse raiding the pantry. Then Hildegard eyes Darya, who is hugging Emma’s skirt. Your grandmother’s trying to be calm, but there’s fear on her face as Hildegard touches Darya’s braids and says to Joost with real tenderness, “This Jew could be the Norse goddess Freyja. What marvelous blond hair and green eyes. Freyja, I am going to call her Freyja. We should send our Freyja to school.”

  Joost says, “Her mother will assist me in the kitchen. The other one, Bashe, reads and writes German and can help with my present for the Führer in Das Judenzimmer.”

  The Jew Room? That don’t sound too promising, and Hildegard says, “I moved my dolls in there.”

  I think, What the hell are they talking about? And Joost, when he hears about the dolls, stands up straight as a maypole and scowls at her. “You did not move out anything, did you?”

  She shakes her head, but refuses to look him in the eye. And Joost is so angry his face is the color of a ripe apple, and I’m terrified for Alexandra. Darya will be in school, Emma in the kitchen, but where will Alexandra go? So I say to Joost, “Herr Obersturmbannführer, can Alexandra work in the kitchen with her mother?”

  Joost shrugs, Hildegard don’t object, and Emma seems relieved. Joost goes toward the palace, waving for Emma and the girls to come along.

  Hildegard says to me, “Your German is good?”

  “Very good.”

  She smiles like we’re best friends. “Wonderful. Let me show you where you will work.”

  We start walking, the four vipers behind us. I see Joost, Emma, and her daughters go into the palace. Then I hear a shout, and Hildegard veers around a hedge. I follow. A crewcut man in a white, blood-smeared smock stands behind a chair next to a table with bottles on it. A wrinkle-faced woman in a babushka sits on the chair, and the man reaches over her and sticks something in her mouth. Twenty or so other men and women are sitting on the grass, spitting at the ground or pressing a hand to their jaws.

  Hildegard snaps at the man in the smock, “I told you. You must give them vodka. This procedure is painful. You are not to hurt them.”

  The man stands up, holding a pair of pliers, and I see a saucepan on the table with a gooey layer of blood on the bottom and gold teeth in the goo.

  “Frau Ter Horst, I—”

  Hildegard don’t wait for him to finish. She sends her vipers to bring bottles of vodka to the people on the grass. The woman in the chair grabs Hildegard’s arm and shouts at her in Ukrainian.

  Hildegard asks me, “What is she saying?”

  “She wants to know why you do this to her.”

  “Tell her we need the gold and to let go of me.”

  I tell her, but the woman tugs on Hildegard and screams. From a leather holster on her belt, Hildegard takes out a pistol that could fit in your palm, and—bam! bam!—shoots the woman in the head. Blood spurts, and the woman falls off the chair. I freeze. A wrong step, maybe Hildegard shoots me. But she holsters her pistol, calls out to her vipers that when the people are done drinking, they should be taken to the woods.

  The woods, I’m sure, will be their last stop. There’s no time to worry about that because Hildegard, who is acting as if she ain’t done no more than spank a disobedient puppy, says to me, “Let us get you settled.”

  Into the palace we go—the soldiers clicking their heels together as Hildegard passes. I never seen such a place—gleaming wood stairways, colorful tiled fireplaces, Oriental carpets, bear rugs, some of the windows stained glass, and stag heads mounted on the walls. We go down two dark hallways, and Hildegard opens a door.

  “Joost calls this the Jew Room,” she says.

  I’m confused. Why the Jew Room? There are bare stone walls, a cluttered wooden desk with a chair on either side, and a bench under the window with a row of three Matryoshka dolls on it. You know Matryoshka? Russian nesting dolls. Carved from wood and painted beautiful bright colors. Hildegard goes over and lifts up a doll of a smiling, rosy-cheeked old woman in an orange and purple babushka.

  “I find these in the houses,” Hildegard says.

  She talks like there’s no difference between finding and stealing, but I don’t see it helps me to explain it to her.

  The doll is a foot tall, and Hildegard opens the old woman by pulling her apart. She takes out a younger woman and pulls off the top of her and keeps going, each doll smaller than the one before it, until five of them are lined up on the bench—from the old woman to a baby.

  “It’s a family,” I say.

  There is something sad about the way Hildegard stares at the dolls. As if they know a secret they won’t tell her. “Not to me, Bashe. To me they are all the same woman, and the different people we are inside. Do you understand?”

  I take a chance and make a joke, hoping she’ll cheer up, because I’m still nervous not knowing why Joost calls this place the Jew Room. “I got enough trouble being one person.”

  I get lucky. Hildegard laughs and we go to the desk and sit across from each other. On the desk is a ceramic ashtray, green packs of Eckstein Cigaretten, a gold lighter with a swastika engraved in it, stacks of thick, cream-colored writing paper, an inkwell, fountain pens, and a copy of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, next to a roll of tanned leather. I look closer at the roll and notice pores, like human skin. Now this being the Jew Room makes sense, I’m shocked, and Hildegard must’ve seen it, because she says, “That is for the binding. It is an old tradition, according to Joost. He wants you to copy Mein Kampf on that paper. Print it neatly and with no mistakes. The last Jew he had doing this made a mess, and Joost was very upset.”

  This is probably where the skin came from. “It will take some time.”

  “That is understood. It is a gift for the Führer, and Joost will not be with him for a while.”

  Hildegard catches me glancing at the cigarettes. “Bashe, help yourself.”

  I light a cigarette, and Hildegard says, “You people make no sense to me.”

  “A poet, Fyodor Tyutchev—he was also a diplomat in Munich—said you cannot understand Russia with your mind. And the same is true with Jews.”

  Hildegard chuckles. “Then what do you understand them with?”

  “Your heart.”

  “I was not taught to use that organ. To my father, the heart—my heart—was of no consequence. I did not want to marry Joost and begged my mother to talk to Father. She tried, but he wouldn’t listen. Father loved Joost’s roast pork and sauerkraut and that he had his own table at his restaurant; it made him feel important when Himm
ler and the Führer visited Nuremberg, and Father would take them there. So I did as my father ordered and married Joost.”

  Hildegard lights a cigarette, and we sit there, smoking, silent, until she says, “I was angry at Father; to tell the truth, I hated him. Bashe, why do we listen to people we hate? Do we think they will love us more if we listen? And then we can stop hating them?”

  She is worked up, and I got no idea what to say. I never had the time to ask myself such foolish questions. I almost tell her to go ask the dolls, but I don’t need no answers because she starts talking again.

  “A month after my marriage, when I learn Joost has no interest in the bedroom, I tell Father, and he says, ‘Be satisfied that you eat well.’ But Father does not want to be embarrassed about his son-in-law, not in public, and maybe he believes it will help Joost act more like a husband, so Father gets him his rank in the SS. Still, Joost does not touch me, but he likes giving orders. Loves giving orders. I can’t blame Father for that, and Father was right about some things—Germany should be the master of Europe, the Slavs, the Jews, all the Untermenschen, the inferior races who—”

  I swear that Nazi bitch is embarrassed she offended me. For one instant, I’m human to her, and she can’t meet my eyes.

  “Father likes to say, ‘God writes our stories in vanishing ink.’ That is the way of the world, I suppose. It is an unfortunate business. Yet I ask myself: why should only men serve? Women can do their part, but people do not believe we are serious. Bashe, you believe I am terrible for shooting that Ukrainian woman?”

  I tap out my cigarette in the ashtray, trying to figure out how to answer so Hildegard won’t shoot me, and I thank God twice because she can’t stop talking.

  “Did that woman have the right to grab me?” she says. “To scream at me? Would she have done the same to a man? She did not attack the man pulling her teeth, did she? Because she thought a man would shoot her. Bashe, am I supposed to be different?”