by Peter Golden
But like I says, your grandmother also tries to rescue people—any of the wounded in the ruined villages, but the Nazis don’t leave many alive. The biggest thing we do is at a farm. We’re on a rise, hidden by brush and trees, and seen three Nazi soldiers, fifty meters away, herding maybe a hundred people—women, children, and some elderly folks walking with canes, into a barn and shutting the doors. One soldier got the tanks of a flamethrower on his back, the other two got Maschinenpistolen. The soldier shrugs off the tanks, then drops his pants and crouches to take a shit. The other soldiers sling their submachine guns over their shoulders and light cigarettes.
“Let’s go,” Emma says, and we take off down the hill, shooting as we run. The soldiers are dead before we get to the barn.
Emma lets the sisters open the doors, and the people, the mothers in tears, come streaming out.
I’ll tell you. Seeing those people alive—that’s one of the best feelings in my life.
Okay, so it’s the fall now, and in the woods, we discover a bunker in a hillside. It’s empty except for crates of potatoes and sugar beets. Maybe the Nazis find the people hiding there. That’s good for us, because they won’t be back. And the autumn rasputitsa has arrived, the rain and mud, and it’s difficult for the Germans to travel. We stay. Katrya, she could be a big-game hunter, I’m telling you. She shot two boars and two deer with her rifle, and we make sausage. Every day we patrol to make sure the area’s safe. One afternoon, the weather suddenly turns warm, we go maybe two kilometers from our bunker, and the twins see a pond and want to swim. This is crazy, Emma tells them, but they don’t listen.
Katrya says, “We will be fine. Go to our hill, and we will be there soon.”
I remember seeing the twins undress and their young bodies, so white and slim, and wishing I never got old and that the war don’t never come.
Emma and me is halfway back to the bunker when it starts to rain and we hear the hammering of machine guns. The firing echoes in the forest. Then there’s an eerie quiet except for the rain slapping the last of the leaves off the trees. Behind us, dogs bark. Emma and me look at each other. Katrya, Oxana, and Olena, they’re dead, they have to be. The dogs get closer, and we start moving through the hard steady rain. I ask Emma if she has a plan. Not to die, she says. Through the trees there is a muddy field, and beyond the field a road, where men are cursing in German. We crawl over wet leaves to the edge of the woods. A long line of canvas-top trucks is stalled on the road, their tires sinking in the mud. The wheel’s fallen off the lead truck, and a soldier is rolling it back to a circle of soldiers smoking cigarettes and standing by the truck. Women, dozens of them, sit in the field, their heads lowered against the rain, their knees drawn up to their chests, their arms wrapped around them.
“Get rid of the army clothes,” your grandmother says, digging a sweater and her old skirt out of her rucksack.
“Why?”
“We’re crawling into that field.”
“We don’t know where those trucks are going.”
“We know we can’t outrun dogs.”
Both of us change, take off our boots, leave our weapons and rucksacks. The rain is so heavy the women and trucks and soldiers are liquid shadows. On all fours, we crawl out into the field, our hands and knees pressing into the mud, till we get to the women. We sit balled up against the rain. No one notices. We’re soaked and shivering when the soldiers order us to the trucks. Nobody looks at us. Your grandmother, I think, is a genius. My mind changes a couple hours later when the trucks stop and we’re ordered onto cattle cars waiting on a railroad track.
That ride. All of us standing, packed together. And the smell. Like you’re drowning in shit. There’s one slop bucket and you can’t get to it. The small window don’t help. Light and dark flick on and off through it. I’m frightened, and Emma whispers, “If they wanted us dead, they’d have shot us in the field.”
But your grandmother’s as frightened as me. Her lips move, no sound comes out. And she’s mouthing the same word over and over—Darya.
When the train gets to where it’s going, the doors slide open. It’s a Polish town—Oświęcim. You know what’s there, don’t you? Auschwitz-Birkenau. Even then, we heard about those murder factories. We jump out of that cattle car, and before I can take a breath of fresh air, the SS guards are shouting at us, dividing up the passengers—you go left, you go right, meaning you live, you die—and children are crying, mothers and fathers screaming, and German shepherds, leaping forward on their leashes, snarl at us like they ain’t been fed in a month and steak’s dangling from our necks.
This is where me and your grandmother learn angels exist—one angel, that’s for sure. Her name’s Klara Fischer. She’s the Lagerführerin—the Camp Leader—and she don’t look like no angel in her uniform: no shape to her, her hair in a bun, and a face so prim and proper if she ever grinned her skin would’ve split like dry leather.
“I need farmers,” she calls out to an SS officer, and grabs Emma and me by the sleeves.
“Who says those two are farmers?” the officer asks.
“Look at their hands, you’ll see, they grew up on farms.”
This is news to me and Emma, but we’re not arguing, and the officer says, “Take them.”
“I need more,” she says.
“Two,” the officer says. “We get the rest.”
Not far is Jagoda, a camp where they got cows, pigs, chickens, and vegetable gardens. We get uniforms—light gray with purple stripes, a jacket with our number and a yellow Star of David, a skirt and kerchief. But Klara also gives us decent boots and wool coats—where the hell she finds them, God knows. The women prisoners—two hundred at most—live in an old shoe factory, sleep on wooden bunks with straw for mattresses. We feed chickens, slop hogs, collect eggs, muck out barns. But we eat good, and I ain’t got much to say about Jagoda. The big news is me and your grandmother don’t die. Because lots of people is dying at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the Nazis are burning the bodies. The wind blows, you can smell burned flesh and hair, and sometimes the ashes go up in the sky like dark clouds. Other times they send us the ashes in barrels to use as fertilizer for the vegetables.
Klara keeps bringing in as many prisoners as she can. One day I ask her why. She says, “I was raised Catholic, in a small village outside Saarbrücken. Every Sunday, in our village, the church was always full, and the women wept as they prayed. And I ask my mother, ‘Why do those women cry?’ And Mama answers, ‘Because women know the horror men make of this world. The women suffer giving birth and men mock their suffering by sending their children to war.’ The world should have less horror, no?”
And Klara ain’t done helping your grandmother and me. We’re at the camp maybe fourteen months—I remember two Christmases go by. Now it’s January 1945. Klara says the Red Army is on the way, and prisoners are going to be evacuated to camps inside Germany. We’ll have to march through the cold and the snow to the trains. Then she gives us four tablets each. Pervitin, she says. Soldiers use it for energy. Take two when you start walking and the other two a few hours later.
The march begins in the morning. Emma and me, we take the tablets, and we’re in the middle of a line. I can’t see the front or back. Even though it’s freezing, we got energy, and I couldn’t care less about eating. The hardest thing is not talking. I feel like I can talk for a week without stopping. I don’t say nothing and swallow the other two pills and keep going—if you fall behind or squat to piss when you ain’t allowed, the Germans shoot you. Eight, nine hours, I don’t know how long it lasts before we get to the town of Wodzisław Śląski, and the Germans cram us into cattle cars.
I would’ve gone meshuggeh, but I know what to expect from the ride to Auschwitz. We wind up in Kaufering, a subcamp of Dachau. We live in huts barely above ground and dig trenches, carry bags of cement, nothing good, and many of the prisoners is sick and waiting outside death’s door. We’re there a few months, and in late April the guards march us to Dachau. American
planes are bombing nearby. And we know their soldiers is coming. So did the SS. They’re burning papers and shooting prisoners. Those SS bastards are convinced they was better than everyone, and when they found out they wasn’t, they had one last party murdering the helpless—one final moment believing they’re gods, pretending Hitler’s lies are true. Your grandmother’s been sick, she don’t eat, she don’t talk, not even about finding Darya. I get cups of water in her, but that’s all. The last hundred meters of the march I’m holding her up. Then on a cold windy afternoon Emma’s shuffling behind me and some other women crossing the Appellplatz, the open square in the middle of the camp. A group of SS men watch us, and one of them shoots at her and some others and orders the rest of us to keep going.
That’s what happens to your grandmother.
I’m sad and scared and talk to Emma like she’s with me. She says the SS plans to shoot us all, and I should escape. Other prisoners are thinking the same way. I go with them and live in a displaced-persons camp until a group of us get to Italy. That’s another long story—how we got on that boat to Palestine. I meet Yankel in Tel Aviv, and we marry, but it’s a hard life there. He’s got a brother in Miami Beach, we move to Florida, Yankel fights with his brother, and we buy this business in Atlanta. Then a woman I met in Tel Aviv gets in touch. She knows I’m from Rostov and asks if I can travel to Russia and do errands for a group trying to save Jews. How can I say no? I got to try. For my first husband and my son. And because I couldn’t save Emma.
That’s what happens to me.
46
Bashe stood at the window, gazing through the bars. Seven blackened filters and a layer of ash overflowed the tin ashtray, and I imagined the filters as bones, and my grandmother breathing in the odor of smoldering corpses while ash from the fire pits of Auschwitz dusted her shoulders like snowflakes.
Outer space was infinite, but, I decided, so was hell.
“Anything about Hildegard?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“We heard she got to Nuremberg with Darya, and a British bomb hit her house.”
“My heart breaks for Darya, but I hope that Nazi whore burned to death.”
“Witnesses saw the house destroyed, but no one saw the bodies. Hildegard and Darya could’ve survived.”
Bashe turned toward us. Her face was streaked with dried tears. “Maybe ask Nate Falk.”
“Who’s that?”
“Used to be one of our best customers—the man worships Patek Philippe. Nate is from Nuremberg and didn’t get to America till after the war. He was an auto mechanic, so the Nazis put him to work and let him live. His wife died, and he just moved to Los Angeles to be by his daughter.”
“You have a phone number?”
“A return address on an envelope, from the last check he sent. I’ll get it for you. But I don’t got the daughter’s name, and a phone number won’t do no good. Nate owned car dealerships, he sold them, and last time he was in, he says the best thing about retiring is he ain’t never talking on the phone again.”
Yuli and I stood. Bashe walked over. “I loved your grandmother.”
I kissed her cheek, and Bashe gave Yuli a look, happy and sad with a touch of lewdness. “Yulianna, you got yourself a good one.”
“Yes, I do.”
* * *
We sat in the Plymouth Fury with the sun flaming out.
Yuli said, “Now we know why Emma wrote that line about vanishing ink in the Picasso book.”
I sat behind the wheel, my hand on the key, not moving.
“Should we find a hotel?” Yuli asked.
“Can we head home?”
“Are you okay, Misha?”
“I feel like driving.”
We were an hour up I-85, with the sky a satiny indigo, when I said, “I wish Emma had told me.”
“What would she say? ‘Bubbeleh, let me tell you about the men I shot.’ ”
Picturing my grandmother mixing me an egg cream and giving me that information was so absurd it made me laugh. In fact, Bashe’s story reeked of absurdity, as though Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling had come up with a movie so grotesque no one could believe it. Except it had happened. And to my grandmother, the smiling lady I always remembered handing out free candy to children.
I said, “She could’ve told me about the camps.”
“Maybe she was ashamed.”
I glanced at the speedometer. The needle was at eighty-five, and I tapped the brake. “How? How could she be ashamed?”
Yuli rested her head on the seat back. “Sometimes the worst feeling about losing my mother and my friends at Lake Bereza isn’t the sadness. It’s that I deserved it. That if I’d been a better person it wouldn’t have happened, and I don’t want anyone to know that about me.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“So?”
That gave me something to contemplate until we reached Greensboro. We were tired, and Yuli spotted a sign for a Howard Johnson’s motor lodge, and we checked in and fell asleep without another word about Bashe or my grandmother.
* * *
Late the next morning, on the outskirts of Baltimore, we stopped at a diner. After the waitress brought us coffee and menus, Yuli went to the ladies’ room. Someone had left a Washington Post on the next table, and I read the front-page story twice. When Yuli came back, I said, “The Post says Taft Mifflin, the general manager of Four Freedoms Radio, died yesterday from an apparent heart attack on M Street in Washington, D.C.”
I passed her the paper, and she read the story. I felt bad that Taft had died, even though his bringing me to Munich had almost gotten me killed and cost Dmitry his life. On the other hand, he was also responsible for my meeting Yuli and learning about Emma’s past. I wasn’t shocked by his death, however, and that scared me, because if it was the KGB, we could be in danger. And Yuli thought so, too.
“Could be a gas gun,” she said, putting down the Post.
Hoping she was wrong, I replied, “The reporter says no one saw anything but a man collapsing on the sidewalk.”
“This is why KGB use cyanide gas. The police do not see blood, they do not treat it like a murder. And even if your FBI or CIA order an autopsy, by the time it is done the assassin can be eating caviar in Moscow.”
“Could this be connected to Der?”
“Taft told us that was about Exodus and the missile designer. We are not involved.”
“He also told us where Joost was and knew we were going to see Bashe. And you thought the KGB was following you in Amsterdam. It could be connected to that.”
“It could.”
“I still want to go see Nate Falk.”
Yuli glanced at the menu in its plastic sleeve, then pushed it aside. “And I still want to see the Hollywood sign.”
Part IX
47
Los Angeles, California
March 11, 1965
During the flight across the country, Yuli sat in the window seat, occasionally fiddling with the bow at the neckline of her dress and reading a John le Carré novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
“Any good?” I asked, more from a desire to talk to her than out of curiosity.
Her eyes didn’t move from the paperback. “Le Carré says spies are vain fools.”
“You agree?”
“A person believing he has the answer for injustice, this is vanity. And vanity is foolish.”
I was stung, thinking that she was referring to my fixation on tracking down Emma’s murderer and who was behind the Munich shooting that killed Dmitry. “Are you saying—”
“I am saying I want to read.”
Her voice was cold, and I swallowed my response, keenly aware that the death of a person you loved was infuriating—the insult of it, the feeling of how dare the universe or God or chance take away your loved one. Reaching into the canvas rucksack under my seat, I retrieved the Guide to Metropolitan Los Angeles that the travel agent at Vacations Unlimited in South Orange Village had given me whe
n I’d booked our plane tickets. After loosening my tie and sliding back my seat, I read through the guide and inspected the foldout maps, dozing on and off until the jet descended through the clouds and Yuli asked, “Is L.A. on fire?”
Leaning over the armrest between our seats, I looked out the window. A thick brown haze was shrouding the mountains and rolling across the city into the San Fernando Valley, where neon signs shone through the gloom, and lines of streets and houses and the irregular aqua dots of swimming pools seemed carved into the bottom of the brownish-green valley.
I held up the guide. “Smog. From the traffic, the chemical plants, and the oil refineries.”
“I’m sorr—”
I shook my head, letting her know that no apology was necessary, and we were holding hands as the jet touched down on the runway.
We retrieved our suitcases, and I rented a burgundy Mustang convertible from Hertz. Even with the sun sinking toward the horizon, L.A. was a balmy Technicolor paradise compared to the slush-gray finale of the New Jersey winter, and after tossing our bags in the trunk and lowering the top, I perused the map, then drove out of the lot.
“Let’s go talk to Nate Falk,” I said.
“You really believe he might know where Hildegard is?”
I inched into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405. “I’d settle for him knowing if she’s dead or alive.”
With a pronounced lack of confidence, Yuli replied, “This would be nice.”
Aggravated by our slow progress and her pessimism, I said, “If you doubted Nate Falk could help, why’d you come?”
Yuli was gathering her hair into a ponytail and clipping it with a metal butterfly barrette. “Because I love you. Now watch the road.”
The address was 450 North Rossmore Avenue, and according to the map, it was thirty or forty minutes from the airport. However, after an hour, we hadn’t even reached the 10, which persuaded me, from then on, to avoid freeways. Yuli, I noticed, was studying the cars and trucks around us.