The remaining Hirschfeld girls crowd the top of the second story stairwell, still in their nightdresses, the older ones holding up the youngest so they can see. Down in the parlor Nancy is small in a white cardigan and navy blue dress. She looks as if she cannot make up her mind whether to laugh or to cry.
Frau Cohen walks her to the deportation center and comes back alone. A single letter comes from Nancy in October. I’m sowing buttons all day. The men I came with are lyeing pavement for motorrways. This work is hard. Its awful crowded. I’d die for a latke. Bles you all.
Through the ensuing winter rumors swirl through Hirschfeld House like tendrils of some invisible gas. The girls hear that all stores owned by Jewish people will be ransacked; they hear the government is preparing a weapon called the Secret Signal, which turns the brains of every Jewish kid to paste. They hear policemen are slipping into Jewish houses at night and shitting on dining room tables while everyone is asleep.
Each girl becomes a carrier of her own individual measure of hope, fear, and superstition. Else Dessau says the Foreign Exchange Department is allowing steamships crammed with children called Kindertransport to travel to England. Before departing, they may go to any department store in the city and select three traveling outfits. Regina Goldschmidt says the police are taking all the handicapped people in Hamburg to a brick house behind the Hamburg-Eppendorf hospital and sitting them in special chairs that shoot their private parts with rays. Epileptics, too, she says, and looks straight at Esther.
Gold and silver are confiscated. Driver’s licenses are confiscated. Smoked herring disappears; butter and fruit become memories. Frau Cohen starts rationing paper and Esther has to resort to drawing on the edges of newspapers and in the margins of books. She draws an ogre closing a butterfly net over a platter-sized city; she draws a gargantuan crow crushing rowhouses in its beak.
Surely, Esther tells Miriam, they will be deported soon. Surely they will be welcomed elsewhere. Canada, Argentina, Uruguay. She imagines Nancy Schwartzenberger sitting down after a day’s work with a dozen others, steaming dishes passing from one hand to the next. She draws the lights of chandeliers reflected in sparkling tableware.
In November of 1938 Esther and Miriam sit inside the neighborhood druggist’s in a leatherette booth with three squares of chocolate between them. It’s the first time Frau Cohen has allowed them out of Hirschfeld House in four days. Every customer who enters seems to know something new: The synagogues are going to be burned tomorrow; the Jewish Shipping Company will be aryanized; all the adult males in the neighborhood will be arrested.
An elderly man runs in and claims boys in jackboots and armbands are breaking windows in a shoe shop on Benderstrasse. The drugstore goes quiet. Within ten minutes the remaining customers have slipped out. Esther can feel a familiar, slow apprehension coiling itself around her throat.
“We should go,” she tells Miriam.
The overweight druggist sits down in a booth across from Esther and Miriam. His face looks as pale and hard as a pebble of quartz. Every now and then he emits an audible whimper.
“Who’s he talking to?” Miriam whispers.
Esther tugs at Miriam’s sleeve. The druggist stares into nothingness.
“I hear his family has already left,” Miriam whispers.
“I don’t feel well,” Esther says. She takes her bottle of anticonvulsant from her pocket and sets three drops onto the back of her tongue. Outside, a gang of boys pedals past, bunched over their bicycles, one trailing a long crimson flag.
The druggist’s telephone, mounted to the wall behind the counter, rings five, six times. The druggist’s attention flips from the telephone to the window.
“Why won’t he answer the telephone?” whispers Miriam.
“We should go,” whispers Esther.
“Something’s wrong with him.”
“Please, Miriam.”
The phone rings. The girls watch. And as they do the druggist takes a razor out of his pocket and cuts his own throat.
7.
Esther is riding with Robert in his father’s Nissan on the way to Foodtown when she hears a train explode to life off to her right. By reflex she glances out the passenger window across Route 20, where no cars are coming and no trains have run for decades—a pleasant midmorning light falls onto a weedy roadside lot—and her legs stiffen and the smell in the car suddenly turns sour and the streetlights appear to flare and then wink out.
Esther comes back to her senses inside the neurology center in Cleveland. A plastic EEG recording cap, studded with dozens of wired electrodes, is installed on her head. Robert sleeps in the corner chair with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and the strings drawn so tightly that only his nose and mouth are visible.
A nurse in a blue smock tells Esther she has had an absence that lasted almost three hours. “But you’re here now,” she says, and pats the back of Esther’s hand.
When he’s awake, Robert plays some sort of videogame on the screen of his phone, or watches quiz shows on the television mounted in the corner. Twice he has long, one-sided telephone conversations with his parents in China. She’s okay, Dad. She’s right here. They’re doing tests.
In the evening a redheaded neurologist sits beside Esther’s bed. Robert reads from questions he has written down in block printing on the torn scraps of a grocery bag. The doctor offers even-tempered answers. The lesion inside Esther’s hippocampus, he says, is almost twice as large as the last time they scanned it. They don’t know why it’s growing but it’s surely responsible for the increased severity of her convulsions. They plan to adjust her medications, increase dosages, introduce neuroactive steroids. They will need to observe her for a week. Possibly longer.
Esther hears little of this. Everything feels watery and remote right now; the drugs make her feel as if she looks out at her room through flooded goggles. Time drifts. She listens to Robert’s electronic game as it emits its anesthetic beeps. Among the ceiling tiles she watches barefoot girls tear small, pink crabapples from trees; they eat quickly, ravenously; they move about pale and strange in their undergarments with the ladders of their ribs showing; they shamble along broken streets, the smallest of them tripping now and then because her shoes are too large; they are gradually subsumed by fog and an unwavering, internal thudding, whether of Esther’s heart or of some intramural hospital machinery, Esther cannot say.
Around midnight Robert leaves Esther and drives the Nissan fifty miles back to Geneva from Cleveland and sits in his parents’ big kitchen alone. His college friends are hundreds of miles away and he has not stayed in touch with high school friends from town. He probably should be reading history books, working on his thesis, editing interviews he has already recorded with his grandmother. Instead, he watches half a television movie about two kids who travel back in time and eats a bowl of canned soup. Out in the yard moonlight spills through the trees.
His mother calls from China to say that his grandmother will need things: toothbrush, cholesterol pills, underwear, something to read. “Underwear?” repeats Robert and his mother, sitting on a folding chair in a government-run transition house in Changsha at 2 p.m., says, “Just do it, Robert.”
Moths flutter against Esther’s porch light. The entry hall feels damp and empty. Robert wipes his shoes; he walks through his grandmother’s kitchen for perhaps the thousandth time. But it feels desolate tonight; it feels as if something vital has been stripped out of it.
He packs a blouse, some pants, a pair of slippers. On the table beside her bed is a novel and sticking out of its pages is a sheet of paper the size of an index card. Robert tugs the card free.
On one side is a smudged pencil drawing: a house with weeds growing out of its gutters. Five stories, two gables. Around the foundation more weeds flow outward into a broken, overgrown street.
On the other side of the card are the names and birthdates of twelve girls. It looks old: The paper is yellow, the text gray.
Name, reads the row acros
s the top, then Date of Birth, Date of Deportation, and Destination. For each name, the dates of deportation and the destinations are the same. 29 July, 1942. Birkenau.
Robert reads each name, going from top to bottom. Ellen Scheurenberg. Bela Cohn. Regina Goldschmidt. Hanelore Goldschmidt. Anita Weiss. Zita Dettmann. Inga Hoffman. Gerda Kopf. Else Dessau. Miriam Ingrid Bergen. Esther Gramm.
8.
In August of 1939, another Hirschfeld girl—Ella Lefkovits—is deported to Romania. She is seven years old. A week later Mathilde Seidenfeld receives her own summons: She is being sent east with a distant uncle to a place called Theresienstadt. “They say it’s a spa town,” Mathilde murmurs. On her last unmarked sheets of paper Esther draws avenues lined with steaming pools, marble bathhouses, crystal globes glowing on top of brass poles. She writes For Mathilde across the bottom, tucks the drawings into Mathilde’s suitcase.
In nightmares Esther burns; she sees flames chew through the draperies of the dormitories; she hears the overweight druggist gulp wetly as he slumps over in his leatherette booth. No letters come from either Ella or Mathilde. By now three new, younger orphans have replaced the deported girls at Number 30 Papendam; two of them are infants. Everyone speaks quietly; up and down Papendam passersby glance toward the sky, as if being hunted from the air.
Germany bombs London; Esther turns thirteen. She swallows her doses of anticonvulsant; she cranks in laundry from the lines in the garden. She listens to the distant sounds of ship whistles and the ringing of the harbor cranes. She speaks to Miriam about faraway places: Katmandu, Bombay, Shanghai. Miriam seldom replies.
In September a newspaper notice demands that all Jewish-owned radio sets must be delivered to collection centers by the twenty-third. Two nights later the twelve Hirschfeld girls gather in the parlor with Frau Cohen, Dr. and Frau Rosenbaum, and Julius, the old custodian, to listen to one last broadcast on the Radiola V. State programming plays an opera from Berlin. The girls perch on the sofas and along the floor with their legs crossed beneath them. The house fills with a grand, staticky voice.
Frau Cohen mends stockings. Dr. Rosenbaum paces. Frau Rosenbaum sits with her back very straight and closes her eyes for the entire performance. Every now and then she inhales deeply, as if the speaker were emitting some rare fragrance.
Afterward the girls remain seated as Julius unplugs the Radiola, loads it onto a dolly, and thumps it down the front steps. Where the radio once stood remains a rectangle of floorboards less faded than the rest.
9.
In the clinic in Cleveland Esther drifts through dizzy, medicated hours. The steroids will prevent edema, the neurologist says; the anticonvulsants will prevent more seizures.
Robert stands over her at what might be noon of her third day there with a sheet of watercolor paper and a fistful of pencils. All his life they have drawn together; as a boy he’d sit in her lap and they’d draw superheroes, spaceships, pirate galleons. He used to spend hours peering into the framed drawings Esther had hung around her house; he’d practically grown up in her lap reading children’s stories she had illustrated. Mice tramping upright through a torchlit tunnel. Princesses ferrying lanterns through a forest. Now Robert pivots his grandmother’s eating tray across her midsection; he props up her back with a pillow and fits the arms of her glasses over her ears.
It takes Esther a full ten seconds to coax her fingers into picking up a pencil. Robert watches patiently, standing beside her, his head tilted.
With great effort she brings the pencil to paper. In her mind she pictures a white house, eleven girls peering out of eleven windows. She traces a single line across the page. Time passes. She manages another line, then two more: a lopsided rectangle.
When she holds the paper up to the lenses of her glasses, it’s a welter of faint crisscrosses. Nothing resolves out of it.
“Grandmom?” asks Robert.
Esther looks at him through tears.
10.
The house cook disappears. Julius the custodian is sent to a labor camp. No letters come from either of them. By now Frau Cohen is spending several hours a day in ration queues, deportation request queues, and paperwork queues. The oldest girls prepare meals; the younger ones wash dishes. Esther draws steamships in the margins of old newspapers: four fat smokestacks, crowds at the railings, porters on the ramps. Any moment the summons will arrive; any moment they’ll be sent away, the horns will blow, the migration will begin.
In the fall of 1941, when Esther is fourteen years old, Dr. Rosenbaum misses an appointment with her for the first time. Frau Cohen sends Miriam and Esther to his clinic. The girls walk quickly, fingers interlaced; every few blocks Esther swallows back an upsurge of panic.
At his little ground floor clinic the doctor’s bronze nameplate has been pried off the wall. Through a side window the girls stand between hedges and watch a fumigator pump clouds of gas into what had been his examination room. The carpet has been rolled up; the cupboard doors are gone.
“They’ve emigrated,” decides Frau Cohen. “They are well-connected people and it was probably fairly easy for them. They waited as long as they could, and then they fled.” She looks Esther in the eye. “Stay busy,” she says. “You’ll be with us.”
Esther thinks: He would have told me. He would not have left without telling me. She peers into her jar of phenobarbital. Inside is enough liquid to last maybe two weeks. Maybe, she thinks, the medicine was something Dr. Rosenbaum invented to prevent Frau Cohen from sending her to an asylum. Maybe it’s merely sugar and water.
Esther tries three different apothecaries. Two won’t let her enter. The last asks for her name, address, and identification papers. Esther scurries out of the shop. She rations herself to three drops a day. Then two. Then one.
Unexpectedly, her brain feels quicker, electrified; a night passes in which all she does is draw by candlelight: twenty-thousand cross-hatchings of pencil, dark cities full of rain, pale figures moving down snowy streets, only a few circles of white on the paper to represent streetlights. Draw the darkness, Esther thinks, and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another.
Hour by hour, day by day, her senses sharpen as her moods destabilize. She feels giddy, then anxious; she yells at Else Dessau for taking too long in the bathroom; she yells at Miriam for no reason she can articulate. At times the walls of the dormitory seem to be thinning out; lying in her cot in the middle of the night, Esther believes she can see through the floors above her into the night sky.
And one winter afternoon when the house seems particularly quiet, the toddlers napping, the older girls doing laundry in the garden, more than nine years since her first generalized seizure, Esther hears a steam engine roar to life in the distance. She stops in the hall at the top of the stairs and clenches her eyes.
“No,” she whispers.
It roars toward her. Hirschfeld House vanishes; Esther walks through a lightless city at nightfall. Between the buildings are warrens and featureless alleys and stony burrows. Soot rains from the sky. Every doorway she passes is crammed with dirty, silent people. They sip gray broth or squat on their heels or study the lines of their hands. Crows flap from gutters. Leaves fly along the streets and die and rise into the air once more.
Esther wakes at the bottom of the stairs with a bone sticking out of her wrist.
11.
Esther has been at the clinic for six days when she asks Robert to take her home. He winces in the corner chair and folds himself over his knees. His shoes look huge to her; his feet seem to have grown another size in the past week. In the guts of the walls, hospital machinery makes its throbbing hum.
“I need to get out of here,” she says.
Robert drags his hands through his hair. His eyes water.
“The doctor says it’s best if you stay, Grandmom. Dad and Mom should be home in a week. Maybe two.”
Esther works her jaw open and closed. It is increasingly difficult for her to speak.
Orderlies clatter past. Somewhere a toilet flushes. How much longer can they keep her here? How much longer can she listen to this monstrous, mechanical, pounding thrum?
She looks over at her grandson, sweet Robert hunched over his knees with his curly hair and Cleveland Browns shirt.
“I need to be outside,” she says. “I need to see the sky.”
By her eighth day in the clinic Robert is practically crying as soon as she starts in on him. An intense urgency sweeps over Esther at unexpected times; she feels as if she has left a burner on, or a child locked in a car, and everything possible must be done to avoid catastrophe. Twice she is caught by nurses as she limps past their station in her gown in the night, barefoot, trailing an IV tube. At other times the hospital is hardly present; she cannot say how long she will be away, or where she is going.
Robert talks about the redheaded neurologist, how he seems like a good doctor. Robert’s parents, he says, have made a breakthrough in China and plan to return home with the twins in fifteen days. “Fifteen days isn’t long. And they take better care of you than I can. You have to wait till they release you.”
Esther tries to rouse herself into full consciousness. “These drugs make me feel dead. Can’t you open a window?”
“They don’t open, Grandmom. Remember?”
“They don’t grow up,” Esther says. “The toddlers stay toddlers. The teenagers stay teenagers.”
“What toddlers?”
“The girls.”
Robert paces beside her bed. His tennis shoes smell of cut grass and gasoline; he has been working two days a week for a landscaper. The light coming through the window is dark green. Out beyond a parking lot, taillights slug forward along an interstate.
“That’s in your head,” Robert says. He twirls his father’s car keys around his index finger. “The doctor says what you see is only real in your head.”
Memory Wall: Stories Page 18