“Of course,” Sonje said, and from her smile Berni could tell this was a lie. She still had the keys in her pocketbook.
“Don’t go back for the candy dish.”
Sonje burst out laughing. “The golden candy dish! I forgot all about it. Where was it hidden? Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry, I won’t.”
It was remarkable, Berni thought now from the train, how easy it was to make a few small decisions that led to something enormous and irreversible. Something as simple as trying on Anita’s wig and conceding that she looked passably like the girl in the photo. The sky outside the windows of the train was completely dark now. They were approaching the Dutch border. The boy beside Berni shivered, yet she could feel heat coming off his skin. They both knew what was coming. His pupils ticked nervously over the black scenery they passed, trying desperately to seize onto something. For a moment his gaze and Berni’s locked in the reflection, his face panic-stricken, his eyes startled.
The foam in Grete’s beer would have dissolved by now. She would have begun to wonder if Berni wasn’t coming.
The train started to slow down, and the boy shuddered. Berni wished she could take his little hand, to distract herself from the thought of Grete waiting. Grete. She had to have been the reason Sonje wouldn’t share the details of the plan with Berni until the very end, yet Berni knew Grete hadn’t breathed a word to Klaus. She’d been desperate to get away from him, from what she’d done for him; that much had been evident in her voice on the telephone.
Still. That did nothing to change the fact that Sister Maria had been interrogated for six days. The radio reported one of the two priests had been sent to Dachau. The lawyer had been found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.
Berni felt a tug on her left hand, and she looked down into the brimming brown eyes of the little boy beside her. He pointed outside. Bright lights, a station. They’d come to the border at Gronau. Berni took a deep breath. When the train finally stopped, she heard the doors bang open.
“Anita,” the little boy murmured.
“Shh,” she said. The corner of the passport envelope was growing soggy in her hand. “Don’t call me that. You can call me something else, nicht? You can call me Fräulein M.”
“Fräulein M.,” he said timidly. “You can call me Hündchen.”
The enormous, thick-booted guard had burst into the front of their car. He was taking a very long time to examine the first bunch of passports. Her heart would explode. “Does your Mutti call you Hündchen?” she asked the boy, her throat thick.
He nodded.
She had to look away, still holding tightly to his hand. He looked exactly the way Grete had in the courtyard of St. Luisa’s, the morning Berni had climbed into the Maybach with Sonje. If she stared at him too long, she knew she would cry.
“Hündchen,” she said. She would not cry. She could not let on that she had their money, hers and the children’s, sewn into her coat. Her voice needed to remain steady. It had to be a clear and confident and reassuring voice—dear Sonje’s voice—so that when their turn with the border guards arrived, she would be ready.
Part IV
New York, 1970
Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Anita, 1970
In the beginning, when she first arrived in the United States, Berni had imagined a little machine inside her head that processed English into German, then German into English, producing her halting responses on ticker tape. Long days of conversation, as with the immigration and customs officials in the harbor, left the machine smoking, overused, in need of oil. In time she used her translator less and less. Phrases like “the rent was due on the first of the month,” and her response, “I will have the money tomorrow,” came naturally. After a year or two passed, she did not have to think Ich werde morgen zahlen first. In time, she even dreamt in English.
Changing her first name, on the other hand, happened instantly on paper, much longer inside her mind.
“What is your name?” strangers asked.
My name is Berni, she told the machine inside her skull, and after a few beeps and burps the machine chugged out a little piece of paper: Your name is Anita. “Anita,” she replied, the word as clunky on her tongue as “cafeteria” or “breakfast.” For a while she avoided meeting people, greeting people; she sought jobs and landladies who asked few questions. She worked in a munitions factory in Atlanta, and would have gone on unmolested for years, perhaps to this day, if Remy hadn’t been so determined to know her. She waited until the day before their wedding to tell him her real name, then insisted he never mention it again.
Janeen’s surprise arrival, sixteen years after Anita had arrived in this country, finally made the translation stick. To the new baby girl in her arms she was Anita and had always been Anita. Anita Moore, mother of Janeen Moore, an American child; she’d let the machine rust.
Not even the arrival of Grete’s letter had changed that. It was not until she had to tell the story to her daughter, to say the words “I was called Berni,” that she began dreaming, not only in German, but as Berni again. Anita was again something she had to put on each morning, like underwear or hand lotion. In the first few moments of every day now, in that vulnerable space between sleep and waking, she was Berni. She was Berni until she reached toward Remy’s side of the bed and found it empty. And then she remembered everything she’d lost.
Anita, the true Anita, appeared to her as she slept. She hadn’t aged, but her hair had grown back, luscious and brown and shiny. She stood with her legs in their Bemberg stockings twisted at the knobby kneecaps, hid her face behind her hand, and laughed.
“You want to see Grete. And you will go to her not to confront her, but because you hope to find she’s changed. Admit it.”
The bed sheets were damp. “No . . . no . . .” She reached for Anita, tried to grasp her by the shoulders. “You are my sister.” Her fingers closed on air.
• • •
Margaret Forsyth resided on a beautiful, quiet block near Central Park, dotted with buildings with crisp new awnings, brass doors, and waiting men in white gloves. Janeen and Anita had walked all the way from their hotel on the Upper West Side, and now they stood, unsure what to do, in front of a pricey boutique with its doors thrown open to the summer. The space inside looked empty, white, and cool; Anita longed to duck inside and hide. She reached for Janeen’s hand and could feel the force of their pulses pounding together.
“We don’t have to do this, Mutti.” Janeen held Anita’s hand tightly between her fingers, the nails painted shimmery white. It seemed only now that the two of them realized the enormity of what they were about to do. “We can still turn back.”
“We must keep going,” Anita growled, pretending Janeen was not the only thing that kept her moving forward. She winced into the sun as they walked. She’d left her bottle of aspirin on the bedside table. Today she would see Grete. She felt exactly as she had forty years before, waiting on her front steps in Schöneberg on Grete’s day off from the Eislers’, or at the edge of a Goebbels rally.
Margaret, she reminded herself, her temples throbbing. Today she would visit someone named Margaret, who had very little to do with the sister she’d left in Berlin.
The urge to find her sister in the flesh had begun after Anita began taunting her in her sleep, and once it wormed its way into her waking thoughts, she could not ignore it. Less than a week after the letter arrived—after she’d read the scorched pages twice, three times—she and Janeen had boarded a train that crawled up the eastern seaboard toward New York City. Only in Washington, when Anita disembarked to smoke a cigarette, had she considered turning back. But she couldn’t, not now. She hadn’t seen Janeen so alive in months. It spooked her a little, in fact, how excited Janeen seemed to be to find more of her family. The last thing her daughter needed was to become entangled in the disappointment that was Grete.
In the gazebo in Shor
tleaf Park, Janeen had waited only a few stunned minutes before her questions began. Anita wished she’d asked about Hündchen first. The news on him was relatively positive. He’d moved to Israel to find his father, his only family member who’d survived Auschwitz.
But Janeen had started by asking about Sonje and the original Anita.
“Sonje and I stayed in contact until November 1938,” Anita said, inspecting her palms. She and Janeen had stayed in the gazebo past two in the morning, and by then all of the lights in the park had gone out. “And you know what happened in November of 1938, Liebchen.”
In the dark, she could not tell if her daughter was crying, but she heard a catch in her voice. “Kristallnacht.” Janeen put her hand to her throat. “And the first Anita?”
It had been difficult to formulate an answer. “I do not doubt that Sonje searched for her until the end.”
The two of them hadn’t moved in ten minutes now, as they watched a truck parked outside Margaret Forsyth’s apartment building, its hazard lights on. Movers were attempting to slide a sofa wrapped in padded blankets down the steps, and for a minute Anita forgot herself and almost went to help them. Instead she and Janeen stood numbly by and watched. A man in a black suit and gloves emerged next, carrying a stack of end tables, and finally, behind him, a woman appeared. Janeen put a hand over her mouth.
The woman looked quiet, delicate and patient; she waited for her doorman to ease the tables down the steps, giving him gentle nods. She had thick whitish blonde hair, cut in a full bob like the top of a mushroom. One of the movers took the lamp she held, and she offered him a kind grin, however brief; she did not look like the type of person who smiled broadly or often. Self-consciously she tucked her hair behind one of her ears and then pulled it out again, and in that gesture Anita glimpsed the plastic cover of a hearing aid.
Anita did not realize until Janeen put her arm about her waist that she’d made a noise, a kind of sob. She put her fingers to her cheeks, but they were dry, and when she looked up she saw Margaret squinting in their direction. Her eyes became big and small, big and small.
Margaret seemed to forget her moving truck. She glided toward them, the little blue jewels of her eyes never leaving Anita’s face. By the time she reached them, she was weeping.
“I knew it was you,” she said. Her voice had become clearer: there was only a hint of a blur to her words now, but she was still Grete. Anita could hear pure Berlin laced through her American accent. “You came. My goodness. Berni! I knew you were . . .”
Her fingers covered the top half of her face, and she stood apart, crying, not touching either of them. Finally Anita stepped forward and opened her arms.
“Grete-bird,” she said, despite herself. She let her head rest atop Margaret’s, shocked at how natural it felt to embrace and hold her, as though no time at all had gone by and neither of them had anything to explain. When they pulled apart, she stared closely at Margaret’s face, amazed at how little had changed in the pink cheeks, the startled eyes.
“This is my daughter,” Anita said, reaching behind her. “This is Janeen.”
“Hello.” Janeen, impossibly calm, offered her hand to Margaret. “Pleased to meet you.”
“My dear.” Margaret lifted her scarf to one of her eyes. “Oh, my goodness. You look exactly like Berni.” She laid her fingertips on Janeen’s flushed cheeks, very delicately, and only then did Anita begin to panic. She could have begun by demanding answers, and instead she’d offered a hug. She’d brought her own daughter forward. It was too late, now, to scream.
• • •
They stood on the sidewalk for a while, not saying much, and then Margaret seemed to remember where they were and muttered something along the lines of, “I suppose I must take you inside.” She seemed agitated now, even though she’d stopped crying; her face looked tight.
“No, we will come back later,” Anita said, but before she knew it they were all inside the elevator, standing in silence, stunned, as though rendered senseless by an explosion.
They stepped out of the elevator and right into her apartment, onto the black-and-white checkered floor of the foyer, and Anita realized all of a sudden that her sister was rich. The address should have given it away, but her mind had been fogged. Her sister was rich.
“Beautiful,” Janeen said in a hushed voice, on tiptoe.
“I’ll get you each a glass of water,” Margaret said, whispering, as though she, too, was only visiting here. She left Janeen and Anita to stand in the hall, peering into the emptied rooms. The walls were papered in satin, each room a different Easter-egg color: yellow, green, pink. Cardboard boxes full of Margaret’s detritus were piled on the floor. Stained outlines of frames littered the bare spaces on the walls.
“Most of the art was my husband’s,” said a voice behind Anita’s left shoulder. She startled so violently that she almost made Margaret spill the glass of water she held out.
“I am sorry about your divorce,” Anita murmured, taking a sip.
Margaret sniffed. “It was a long time coming. We had some good years, some bad.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Charles and I split this apartment in the divorce, so we sold it. I will be happier in Morningside Heights. And you, Berni? You’re married, still?”
Anita opened her mouth. She was no longer Berni, no longer married. Or was she? She twisted the ring on her finger.
“My father passed away,” Janeen said, and Margaret swallowed, her forehead and neck turning crimson.
“Oh.” Margaret put her hands to her chest. “I had no idea. When?”
“Last month,” Anita grunted.
“I’m sorry, Berni. I truly am sorry.”
Anita bristled at the name. Janeen looked at her with wide eyes. “Please, I’d prefer that you don’t—”
A young man’s voice boomed toward them, coming from a room in the front of the apartment. “Who are you talking to?” he called. “I found the missing andiron, by the way, but I still think you should sell the set.”
“I . . .” said Margaret, her face drawn. “Erik . . .”
He sighed audibly. “You don’t even have a fireplace in the new apartment, Mom.”
All three of them had frozen. Anita swallowed, her throat dry. She hadn’t thought about other people, about the fact that Margaret had children, but of course—they’d be here, they’d be involved. They would have even more questions than Margaret did.
“Who’s that?” Janeen whispered, and Anita felt her heart ping. The boy in the other room would be her cousin.
“That’s my son,” Margaret whispered. She led them into the living room. At the far end, two giant windows displayed pure green, the tops of the trees along the park. A grand piano, dust on its shiny lid, sat in the corner, its bench turned on its side. Among a sea of moving boxes sat a young man of about twenty, who looked at them suspiciously over a stack of plain paper and a pile of knickknacks. His hair was ash blond, the same color Grete’s had been when she was his age, but darker and kinkier at the sideburns.
“I don’t know how to say this, Erik dear.” Greeting her son had made Margaret’s voice turn nasal. She reached for Anita’s hand, as much for support, it seemed, as in introduction; it was the first time they’d touched since their brief embrace outside. “Anita Moore, Janeen, this is my son, Erik. He’ll be a junior at Cornell this fall.”
Erik put down the tchotchke he’d been wrapping, brushed his hands on his jeans, and came to greet them. He smelled of fresh sweat and aftershave, though his cheeks still had a soft, boyish appearance. He gazed at Anita and Janeen, his face bewildered. Anita gazed back.
Her sister’s son. She had a clamp on her voice box.
He grinned at Janeen, lingering on her a little longer than was necessary, and Margaret cleared her throat. “Anita is my sister, Erik. Your aunt. Janeen is your cousin.”
Erik’s expression changed little, as though he did not believe it. “Your sister?”
“Oh, my goodness.” Unable to hold he
rself back any longer, Anita reached for Erik’s shoulder. “Yes, I’m your aunt.” He was shorter than she was, and under her grip she felt him puff up a little.
He scratched one of his sideburns. “I’m sorry, I . . .” he said, hand on his chin. “I didn’t know my mother had family.” He squinted at Margaret, who smiled weakly. “You’ve got to be pulling my leg. Why have I never met them before?”
Margaret hesitated, and so Anita said, “Your mother and I were separated, my sweet nephew, and now we have thirty-five years of catching up to do.”
“Why did you come today, of all days?” he said. “Why haven’t I heard of you before?”
Not shy at all, Anita thought—Erik was more of a young Berni than Grete. Had her sister thought the same thing over the years? Margaret still looked pale, her lips near colorless. She opened them, fluttering her eyelids, searching for an answer.
It was Janeen who rescued her. “Don’t you have a daughter, too, Aunt Margaret?”
Margaret blinked rapidly after “Aunt Margaret,” and Erik turned his eyes sharply toward Janeen. “Yes, Anna. She lives in London.”
Erik sucked his teeth. “She couldn’t be bothered with this whole divorce and moving thing. Lucky her.”
Out on the street, traffic, horns, someone shouting. Margaret looked from Janeen to Erik for a moment, then brightened. “Erik, honey, you have a few boxes to consign. Perhaps Janeen would be interested in helping you?”
He snorted. “What you’re letting me sell fills like a box and a half, man. It’s not like I need help carrying it. Unless you’ll part with more junk.”
Margaret ignored him. “Could we send you out with him for a little while, dear?” She put her hand on Janeen’s shoulder, and again Anita felt a note of panic inside her throat.
“Sure.” Janeen glanced at Erik, then her mother. “What do you think, Mutti?”
Erik chuckled. “Where’d you come from? Texas?” Janeen’s cheeks went red.
“I think the two of you should get to know each other,” said Anita. “Erik, you can show my daughter a bit of the city, nicht?”
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