by Betsy Carter
Egon thought back to the last words his mother had said to him, and repeated them to Meyer. “Ach, nobody deserves anything. It’s not about that.”
Rudolph had been the only connection to his mother. Now there was no one left who knew how she’d smelled, or the way she’d picked at her fingernails when she was nervous. For all Egon knew, the two of them were reunited somewhere: once again, without him. In that regard, Meyer was right. It was the shock of the void. He took out a copy of European Ornithology, and in the time it took him to page through it, the birds came alive. Their tck-tck calls were audible and their black marble eyes stared back at him. He could visualize the way his mother’s neck would strain as they flew by or perched on a nearby branch, and he felt her breath on his ear as she whispered, “That’s a blackbird.” In this way she came back to him, as young and visceral as during their days in the Stadtwald before the troubles.
He remembered Carola’s saying that his father had eyes only for his mother. She was the only friend he had who’d known his parents. He yearned to revisit happier moments and hoped she would be able to excavate others he’d forgotten. Had his mother smiled or touched his arm when she asked him to show Carola the turtle? Had his father ever referred to Egon as “my son” or “my boy”? When he called to tell Carola the news, she promised that she and Max would come by after work. She was completing her degree to become a music teacher, and Max was working as an apprentice in an architecture firm.
That night, Egon sat on the couch beside her. “Do you remember the first time I visited you?” Carola asked. “My mother made me wear my only dress. She didn’t want us to look like the poor relations. Whenever my parents talked about your family, they would always sit up straight and say in a formal tone of voice, ‘Ah, those wundersam Schneiders.’” She giggled at her imitation of them but saw that Egon was not laughing. “Partly, I think, they did that out of jealousy, but also out of respect. They really liked your mother. They thought she was a true artist, and very beautiful. Your father was harder to know. He was older and more standoffish, but brainy, and handsome in his day. A real ladies’ man, I gather, until your mother came along.” She recounted their accomplishments and how well regarded they were. “The newspapers were always writing about them, calling them the Audubons of Europe. My father said they were the royalty of Frankfurt.”
Carola smiled at Egon, who seemed pleased with her recollections.
“And what about me?” he asked, immediately embarrassed by his neediness.
“You? You, apparently, were a complete surprise.”
“The kind that pops out of a closet and scares you half to death?”
“No, not at all. More like the kind that arrives wrapped in pretty paper and a bow. You were apparently a beautiful child with talents of your own. You played piano. You knew all about the animals. When my mother told your mother how nice you were to me on the day we visited, your mother said, ‘Egon is a big-hearted boy.’”
There it was, the gift he’d been hoping for, unopened words from his mother. Even if Carola’s version of his family was overly flattering, it was what he craved on this night.
She continued: “You used to go to the forest and draw with her, right?”
“Yes, we drew the birds together.”
“Did you ever think you would follow in their footsteps?” asked Max, speaking his first words of the evening.
Egon got up from the couch and went to his bedroom. He came back carrying the glass eye. “This was my mother’s. Her father gave it to her with the instructions, ‘Fresh eyes on the world.’ My mother taught me how to observe, to study the details. I suppose, insofar as seeing is essential to being a naturalist, I follow in their footsteps.”
There were so few birds in Berlin that it had been a while since Egon had given them any thought. It was not the kind of place where one stopped to take notice of a wing pattern or listen for a particular song. Even the way Berliners talked—fast and directly—was harsher than the roly-poly cadences he’d heard back home. In Frankfurt, there was space to breathe your own air and vast patches of sky where you could get lost in what was going on. Egon couldn’t imagine sitting in the park for an afternoon in Berlin, as he had with his mother, waiting for a swallow to appear, or for the sun to drop low enough to backlight a loon. When you sat in Berlin it was with purpose: at a bar, in a concert hall, on a trolley; never for the pleasure of sitting. Nowadays, he found little pleasure in Berlin. Over the past years, he’d lost a part of himself here, and he felt regret for who he was becoming. If his mother knew him now, would she still think him a “big-hearted boy”?
Though he could never pinpoint the moment he made the decision to return home, he knew it was the birds that would lead him back to Frankfurt after he finished his ophthalmology studies. But not before he drew the yew and the Ziziphus jujuba himself.
6.
The linen tablecloth, with its embroidered diamond patterns, was perfectly ironed, as were the matching napkins. Each dish, fine Dresden china, had a garland of roses in its center and was ringed with gold filigree. The knives and forks were sterling silver with intertwined initials on their handles, as was the serving knife that sat in the center of the table, waiting to slice the crumb cake warming in the oven. Its buttery perfume mingled with the earthy smell of fresh coffee and settled like a sense of well-being over the entire apartment. This is how it was every Saturday evening at five thirty in Kaethe and Georg Schnabel’s kitchen at 25 Altkönigstrasse, Frankfurt, where Egon now rented two rooms.
Outside, the building looked like the grand villa it had once been. There were recessed windows and a stone balustrade that ran across a balcony on the third story. But inside, it had been broken up into several flats with narrow rooms and fourteen-foot-high ceilings. Kaethe and Georg’s flat was filled with mismatched furniture too large for the tiny rooms. A grand piano took up the entire parlor, and the rosewood dining table in the kitchen had once been a side table in the library of their mansion. Kaethe never missed an opportunity to reminisce about their old house: “We had ten rooms, two servants, and a gardener.” They kept a tiny silver dinner bell on their kitchen table, the bell they’d used to summon servants. “I only had to ring once,” she’d say, shaking the tiny object as if it might still conjure up a butler. Sometimes she put her hand over her heart when she talked. “All the fruit trees and roses you could imagine, and lilacs in the spring. Those were the happy days.”
Outside, it was 1932, and Frankfurt bore the ruined splendor of the depression, but inside 25 Altkönigstrasse, it felt more like the Frankfurt of Egon’s childhood.
The Schnabels were in their late forties, near the age his mother had been when she died. They dressed as they might have twenty years before, he in wing-collared shirts and a homburg, she in long skirts and sturdy lace-up shoes. He was tall and angular, with sharp features that reminded Egon of a Eurasian crane. She had a round flat face with eyes as small as umlauts; although she was stout and seemed to be sinking into her frame, in the wedding photograph that hung in the foyer, she looked statuesque and self-satisfied. Her father had been a wealthy textile manufacturer, and her young husband a decorated war hero and promising barrister. Was it any wonder that Kaethe dreamed of the past and Georg, who had recently been dismissed from his law practice because it already had too many Jews, refused to accept the present? “Germany is going through a phase,” he insisted. “All great countries suffer growing pains.”
For only forty reichsmarks a month, Egon rented a bedroom, an office, and a surrogate family. The Schnabels included him in their evening meals, and once a week Kaethe washed his laundry and starched and ironed his white linen shirts. His medical practice had caught on quickly. The people of Frankfurt remembered the handsome and affable son of the Schneiders and were eager to come to him with their rheumy eyes and cataracts. He was also a rigorous doctor. Before any complicated procedure, he’d draw step-by-step diagrams for his patients. He made up stories for the young ones about
animals, using his father’s funny voices. If a patient cried, he’d stop and squeeze her hand; those who couldn’t afford to pay he’d treat for free.
“You’ll never get rich taking those charity cases,” Georg warned him.
“That’s fine with me; this is what I love to do,” said Egon. “The money will come or it won’t.”
By now, his reputation was such that people traveled from as far as Wiesbaden to be treated by him, and while he was still living with the Schnabels, he was able to afford a new and bigger office in the middle of town with double oak doors and a view of the river. He hung his diplomas on the wall and affixed an oval brass plate to the door with his name engraved in black script: Doktor Egon Schneider. When Egon described the plaque in a letter to Meyer, who remained in Berlin, Meyer wrote back, Why make it so easy for them to find you?
Egon was aware of a disturbance in the air, like fog rolling in, but as long as nothing had changed in his life, he shrugged off Meyer’s warning as exaggerated. He was still invited to dinner parties, where he pounded out jazz on the piano, and he still had many of Frankfurt’s finest women on his arm when he went to the ballet and opera. While other people his age married and produced babies, he reveled in his bachelorhood. The tall doctor was known for his gentle hands and compassionate manner. One of his patients, a middle-aged lady, said of his big blue eyes that they were the kind a woman could fall into. Mothers made sure to bring their daughters to his office, even if they weren’t nearsighted or suffering from conjunctivitis. Though Egon never settled on any of them, he had his time with many of them. He was tender with them, and mesmerized by their differences. With some, lovemaking was a competitive sport; for others, a thing to be endured. Some cried out in passion, others wept softly into his neck. One smelled like rain on a summer’s night, another like lebkuchen. In the night, they slept nestled into him or curled up on the other side of the mattress. He told himself it was the unknowable that kept him going from bed to bed; he never tired of the infinite ways a woman could be beautiful.
Of all his friends, only Meyer remained single. He was still in Berlin working for Ullstein Verlag, though now he was a senior editor and had also written his first children’s book, Die Bleiche Prinzessin von Preußen (The Pale Princess of Prussia). “I could have written Schneewittchen,” he liked to say, “but the Grimm brothers beat me to it.”
The book became a hit in Germany. Though Meyer was as plump and disheveled as ever, women began making themselves available to him. “They’re like bloodhounds,” Egon teased during one of their monthly visits in Berlin. “They know how to sniff out the successful ones.”
Now when he and Meyer talked about sex, they did so as equals. Egon resorted to elaborate ophthalmological metaphors to rationalize his catholic tastes: “Blinking rhythms are infinite, and no two people see colors exactly the same way. If machinations of the eye can be so subtle and varied, can you imagine how infinite are the possibilities of sexual congress? Why settle for a single color when there is such a rainbow of possibilities?”
For once, Meyer was the succinct one: “I just want to fuck as many as I can before the apocalypse.”
Meyer’s pessimism took shape for Egon at one thirty on the morning of May 11, 1933, when Kaethe Schnabel, in her dressing gown and bare feet, pounded on his door and yelled, “Hurry, emergency phone call!”
Egon did not bother to put on his robe. He picked up the telephone in the living room and heard Meyer’s ragged breathing on the other end.
“What is it?” Egon shouted. “Are you all right?”
“There was a book burning last night. At the square between the university and the opera house.” Meyer couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “Students with torches, they burned thousands and thousands of books. Goebbels was there screaming about the death of Jewish intellectualism, how this was the end of the old era. They called out names, then threw the books into the bonfire. Sigmund Freud. Thomas Mann. Stefan Zweig. Elisabeth Schneider. Rudolph Schneider. They burned your parents’ books, Egon. All of them. And my Princess.”
Meyer was struggling for air. “Stop talking,” Egon demanded. “Breathe slowly. You’ve got to calm down.”
“Calm down?” gasped Meyer. “Don’t be an idiot. There’s nothing to calm down about.”
For the next year and a half, Egon continued to treat his patients behind the double oak doors. He still wore his finely tailored suits and, as always, had his Saturday coffee and cake with the Schnabels. All the things that gave him a sense of well-being were in place. But there was a sourness in his stomach that backed up every now and then.
Then, in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, depriving Jews of their citizenship. In Cologne, Carola was fired from her job when Jews were barred from teaching in the schools, and her husband, Max, was kicked out of his company because no one wanted buildings built by Jews. Tibor Velkind, a young sculptor who lived next door to the Schnabels, was arrested because the authorities found his work to be “critical of the regime.” By the new year, Egon was drinking a liter of milk a day to soothe the burning in his belly.
With newspapers under the control of the Nazi Party, there were new rules posted about Jews every day: “All jockeys and drivers of horses must be Aryans.” “It is a crime for Jews to practice journalism.” “The death penalty for anyone who publishes treasonable articles.” “Five years for anyone distributing atrocity stories.” “In public parks, Jews can only sit on designated benches painted yellow.”
When Egon told Meyer, “They’re making it impossible for us to live here,” Meyer responded, “Soon they’ll make it impossible for us to get out of here.”
In March 1936, a young friend of Carola’s, a woman named Liesl Kessler, came to Egon because her right eye wouldn’t stop tearing. “I’m certain I’m crying for what’s happening here,” she said. Even after Egon plucked the inwardly growing eyelash that was blocking her tear duct, she continued to weep.
Liesl had smoky gray eyes and wore a double strand of pearls that fell below her tanned throat. Her father, Leopold Kessler, was the president of the National Bank of Frankfurt. With her bright red lipstick and Marlene Dietrich eyebrows, she had the sheen of confidence that wealthy girls often did. Egon used his paternal voice to try to comfort this pretty child: “Come, come, it isn’t as bad as all that.” He heard the hollowness of his words, as did she.
“You’re wrong, it really is that bad. Awful things are happening. We should get out as soon as we can.”
Little by little, patients whom Egon had known since their childhood stopped making appointments with him. Some offered apologies; others disappeared. One spring evening, Egon saw a postal worker being beaten by brownshirts who were yelling that he was carrying Jewish propaganda in his mail pouch. Nobody, including Egon, tried to help him. He felt humiliated that he, a doctor, stood by so passively as another human being was hurt.
Meyer kept telling him that it was only a matter of time before Jewish doctors lost their licenses. Ever since the Nuremberg Laws, Meyer had been standing in line for hours a day at various government agencies in order to secure the visa, passport, certificate of health, financial statement, and affidavit of support—more than fifty pages of documents—one needed to emigrate.
Despite eliminating fried food, coffee, tomatoes, and citrus fruit from his diet, Egon was gulping down bicarbonate of soda every three or four hours, trusting its salty fizz to squelch the fire in his gut. His dreams were interrupted by visions of his parents’ books in flames. He could see their pages igniting, hear the hiss, smell the smoke. And always, the sad mound of ashes.
On a dazzling morning in January 1937, Egon arrived at his office to find the words Juden Doktor written in red paint across his double oak doors. The letters were perfectly aligned. Egon locked himself inside and called Meyer, who offered no consolation: “I’d say you got off easy. The next time they won’t be so considerate.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Not
at all,” said Meyer. “The only funny thing is your pig-headedness, and even that’s getting stale. For God’s sake, Egon, you’re an ophthalmologist. Use your eyes. Look around you. The writing is literally on the wall. What the hell are you waiting for? Get your papers in order.”
“I’m waiting for it to pass.”
“Believe me, it’s not going to.”
“I see that you’re still here.”
“Not for long. I hope to be out of here by the end of the year.”
Egon hung up the phone and went outside. He hoped Juden Doktor would be gone, that he’d imagined the whole thing. But there it was, its blood-red letters bold. Whoever did this had done it before.
He remembered old Frau Hennig. The day she came to call him out of class. The walk home and how he had tried to convince himself that the worst had not happened. The snag in his heart when he saw his father sitting on the steps. The way his father had whispered, “Broke her neck.” The shock of those words would always be a part of him.
This felt like that.
He was standing on the precipice of the inevitable, about to spiral into darkness the way one does in the moment before sleep. It took away his breath and loosened his bowels. His office, the cherrywood rolltop desk, the Persian rug, his brass plaque, his white shirts, his home on Altkönigstrasse, the parties, his piano playing, his patients, the river, his friends, his women. If he wanted a life, he’d have to give up the very things that defined it.
It took Egon sixteen months to gather his papers—a blink of the eye compared with how long it took most people. Meyer, who had made his way to New York City, had found a wealthy friend of a friend to write the coveted affidavit of support guaranteeing to provide for Egon should he become a burden to the United States government. When the letter came, Egon had three days to pack his belongings and catch a train to Hamburg, where he would board a ship for New York City.