My father’s tragedy is that he knows he is miles from the man he might have been. And my tragedy is that I see that distance in his eyes every time I look at him.
“Papa,” I reply, “I’ll stop being rude if you’ll only tell me what you intend to do about the hearing.” I speak with pleading and prayer in my voice because I’ve realized our family won’t survive Hansi’s sterilization. Because I will send the walls of this cramped apartment crashing down and destroy what was probably Mama’s last hope—that our family might outlive her death—unless I convince this chain-smoking coward to help me.
He sits down. A concession on his part, since it means he’s willing to have a long talk with me. I’m grateful. “Thank you for staying, Papa,” I say.
“You don’t have to thank me.” He smokes greedily. “Sophie, after all the difficulties we’ve had with Hansi, you can’t really believe that he has a right to have children.”
“Papa, he’s not an imbecile,” I say desperately. “There’s hidden life inside him.”
“I didn’t say he was stupid. I just think we’ll never know exactly what he is or isn’t. And neither would his children. Having Hansi as a parent would not be fair to them.”
A good argument, but I’ve been saving a better one since my outburst at school. “If Germany can grant a puny, repulsive propagandist like Dr Goebbels the right to have children, then I think Hansi should have the same right.”
Ein widerwärtiger Propaganda-Winzling. My description of our Propaganda Minister has a wonderfully condescending ring to it, but Papa thinks I’ve gone too far. He jumps up so quickly that I’ve no time to defend myself. He slaps me across the face, which makes me gasp and drop the wooden spoon I’ve been holding. Then he grabs my wrist and shakes me hard. “Don’t you ever say anything like that again!” he shouts.
“Don’t touch me!” I yell back, and I twist out of his grasp. I want to curse him, but humiliation has robbed me of my voice. I look down for a long time, unable to think.
“I warned you,” he says.
The excuse all bullies use. But the only thing that matters is Hansi. My heartbeat, swaying me from side to side, reminds me of that. I kneel down to pick up my spoon. “If you get the notification annulled,” I tell Papa, “then I won’t oppose your marriage to Greta.”
He laughs caustically. “Who said anything about marriage? Besides, you think it’s that easy to overturn an order from the ministry? Sophie, there are laws in this country—laws all Reich citizens need to obey.” As if reading from a cue card, he adds, “Obeying our Führer’s laws is our freedom.”
No wonder the films the Nazis make are all so stilted and artificial. Men like Papa can’t even read a heroic line properly.
“Is that from Mein Kampf?” I ask.
He shakes his head patronizingly. “Despite all your supposed sophistication, you’re just like your mother.”
“You talk as if she was beneath you,” I say challengingly.
Something in the way he stretches his arms over his head, smokes, and says nothing … I feel as if I’ve opened Pandora’s box and he’s taking his time to decide which monsters of our past to summon to his side to join the fight against me.
“She never understood how the world works,” he finally observes, adding threateningly, “And you don’t either. So let’s just leave it at that before someone takes a bad fall.”
Papa wants me to know that he’s taking it easy on me—is being generous—but I get the feeling he has been meaning to insult Mama to my face since her death. He wants to justify his sexual escapades to me by rendering her unworthy of his love.
“Does it make you feel good about yourself to condemn a woman who is no longer around to defend herself?” I ask.
“Sophie, you don’t know anything, though you sure as hell think you do. Your mother knew she didn’t understand the ways of the world. She agreed with me!”
“So you convinced her she wasn’t up to your standards. Good work. Are you sure Greta is up to your image of what a German woman should be?”
“Greta loves me, which your mother didn’t. That’s the only standard I have. So you can dislike me for finding affection at my age if you want. Greta is a bright, lively woman, even if she isn’t up to your standards. That’s what you really want to say, isn’t it?”
Papa, too, can launch a dart into the center of the truth on occasion. But who would want to describe a lover as munter—lively? Is Papa a dull man with mediocre desires, despite all his big talk of creating a paradise for the Volk? Maybe that’s what he’s tried to hide from the world all his life. A fourth-place gymnast and nothing more …
“You’re the last person who can judge me, in any case,” he adds.
Does he know about Isaac? “What are you trying to say?” I ask.
“That I’ve known for years what you do with Tonio. It’s a disgrace. You should marry him while he’ll still have a sluttish girl like you.”
He uses the ugly German word schmutzig for sluttish, which also implies I’m filth. I wish he’d simply have hit me again; it takes me twenty years to pull schmutzig out of my gut.
Now that he’s really hurt me, he turns to leave, but there’s one more question that will keep me up nights forever if I don’t ask it. “Why did you marry Mama if she didn’t love you?”
“Because I loved her. And I thought she loved me. We both mistook her gratitude for love.” He gives an ironic laugh. “We were two kids with very bad eyesight.”
“Did you manage to convince her before she died that she was wrong to want to save Hansi from sterilization?”
“I convinced her that there was no point in wrecking everything we’d worked for by fighting a legal battle we’d only lose.”
“Everything you’ve worked for, you mean.”
He sighs with exasperation. “In a German family, that amounts to the same thing.”
Another cue card, but this one he has managed to read much more convincingly. Maybe he just needs more practice.
“So before she died, she knew Hansi would be sterilized?” I ask.
“Of course. And if you’ll think for a minute, and stop hating me for telling you the truth, then you’ll realize you had no reason to hope otherwise.”
Tonio hugs me hard when he hears what’s about to happen to Hansi, but he spoils our closeness when he informs me in a rigid, military voice that difficult sacrifices must sometimes be made for the good of the nation. I push him away, and he apologizes right away, which is why I don’t get up off the bed and put my clothes back on even though I know I should.
Dr Hassgall tells me that hiring a lawyer will prove useless; parents of two of his students have tried that route and failed. Could I earn enough money in France to care for my brother and me? Isaac wakes me from my fantasies of becoming a waitress in Paris. “Hansi is a minor,” he points out. “You’d have to leave him behind with his father.”
“I could never leave him behind.”
“But you’ve got to make your own life!”
That incenses me. “I’ve already made my own life. For better or worse, this is it!”
I end up begging my father to intercede again. But Papa tells me not to worry, that he knows what’s best for his son. I can see he’s about to add, Which happens to be what’s best for Germany!, so I cut him off by saying, “I understand—there’s no need to say anything more.”
Maybe part of why I remain in Germany long after I know I should leave is so I can go on despising my father. Contempt can be very sustaining, as I come to learn.
I do not attend Hansi’s hearing at the Heredity Court on the 16th of March, since it falls on a school day. Also, Papa prefers to go without me.
“Everything went very smoothly,” he tells me as soon as they come home that afternoon, adding that the date for my brother’s vasectomy has been set for two weeks away, the 30th of March. A happy Hansi comes traipsing in as we’re talking, loose-limbed and gangly, as he is when he’s exhausted. He hands me
his coat, then shuffles off to his room to lie down, leaving a trail of muddy footprints behind him.
“Take those shoes off!” I call after him. “And if you get your sheets and blankets dirty I’m going to stuff you in the goddamned fish tank!”
“I thought it better that we get it over with fast,” Papa tells me, “so I had them set the first available date.”
“Good thinking,” I reply. “Why wait to lose your grandchildren!”
On the 30th of March, I get up early and draw my brother with my pastels while he’s snoring away. I give him fire-red hair, flaming hands, and hollow sockets for eyes. Papa comes into our room, wakes him with a kiss, and tells him he’s to have a checkup this morning with a wonderful government doctor. “He’s very important,” Papa says enticingly. “You should be honored.”
My brother buys that line; he’s either too sleepy or too damn dumb, or both. When my father gazes down at my sketch, he says, “That doesn’t look at all like my Hansi.”
My Hansi… ? “No, it looks like my Hansi,” I reply angrily. “And my Hansi has the power to destroy all the people who want to hurt him.” I turn to the boy. “Right?” I ask, and the flashes in my eyes mean, Please agree with me, but he just shrugs.
Papa looks at me as if I’m mad. Does he fear the curse of his wife’s family? I hope so.
In the taxi over to the Buch State Hospital, Hansi grows excited—we hardly ever get to ride in a car. He rolls and unrolls his window while we’re zooming out of town on Prenzlauer Allee, giggling, and he sticks his head out so the wind can blow back his hair. I hold onto his coat just in case he decides it would be fun to hurl himself onto the street.
Buch is a castle-like building with comforting ivy growing up the handsome brown brick. Civilized and stately. Clever architecture for a sterilization center. Even sniffing rabbit-like as we go inside and scenting all those sour hospital odors doesn’t set Hansi off. Only when he sees a physician in a surgical mask at the top of the central staircase does he start jiggling his hands and moaning.
“Stay calm!” Papa orders him.
A miscalculation. Papa’s gruff voice is all the proof the boy needs that he’s walked into a trap with his name scripted on iron jaws, and he begins to holler as if there’s a rainstorm blowing through his head. When I take his arm, he starts flailing, and he catches me on my bottom lip, so hard that I taste blood right away. I staunch the gash with my ruby-colored Prague napkin—ruined forever—while two nurses help Papa get the boy under control. One of them jabs Hansi’s arm with a needle and then he’s led up the stairs to the surgical theater.
I slink off to the waiting lounge, blotting blood, feeling as dull and wooden as the sound of my footsteps. A mind unsure of the present sometimes seeks assistance from the past, and I recall a time when Hansi—maybe six or seven—is running across Marienburger Straße without paying attention to the traffic. Maybe he’s chasing after a bird call or has spotted a rabbit. A big black car comes from the left and swerves to keep from hitting him. I see the peril before Hansi does. The tires squeal as space contracts around my head, and the honey-slowness of the skidding automobile makes me feel as if I’m as small and powerless as a single thought. I start to yell, but it’s already too late; Hansi has made it safely across the street. The driver gets out to talk to my brother. All I remember is that the man is in short sleeves and that he doesn’t raise his voice. He must only want to warn my brother of what can happen to children in a big city, but Hansi drops down on the sidewalk and clamps his hands over his ears. The boy looks back and forth, trying to find me—180 degrees of yearning anguish. When he doesn’t spot me, he knocks his fists against his head, and at that same moment, I feel the condensation of a thousand vague impressions into a revelation I do not want to have: this boy does not experience the world like other people do.
When the car passed me, I felt a special wind in my hair, like Mama’s fingers, and I heard a sound like the ocean, and now a stranger is talking to me and I don’t want to hear anything he says, and I can’t find the girl who always takes me outside …
That’s what I imagine his thoughts are. All he later says is, “I got confused,” too embarrassed to say more. He stands in front of me squirming, his legs like coiled snakes.
The moment that he sits down on the Marienburger Straße sidewalk I know for sure that he is different from other children. And that I am too. Because I am the big sister of a boy who is not quite at home on the earth.
To this day, Hansi is still dashing across a street in my mind, risking death. He turns this way and that, scared and lost, a boy barely treading water in an urban ocean that conceals in its depths all the bad things that can happen to brothers and sisters.
I wonder if he ever knew that I wanted to call out to him in time and failed, and that I was sorry.
Sitting in the waiting room, where Papa soon joins me, I tell myself that a boy who survived so many dangers will also survive a surgeon. And he will fare better than Isaac, me, and Vera over the course of this slow war. All the children who will be summoned for operations—pointy-headed kids and epileptics, girls who converse with Jesus in their heads and boys born mute … They will bear no responsibility for the crime done to them. None of them will ever have to deny they are Jews or name the people they betrayed. Or stay up at night wondering if they could have done more.
What is good in Hansi will never be destroyed. Three times I tell that to myself before I walk home without waiting for him. And I remind myself that he is schön, schön, schön…
When Hansi and Papa return from the clinic the boy is heavy from the sedation, but his eyes show no sign of distress. I run my hands over him to make sure he is still with me, just as I did when he was almost run over by a car.
“How’s your lip?” Papa asks me, squinting at the crusted gash as he takes his coat off. He reaches for me, meaning to make peace, but I lean away.
“So it’s all over?” I ask him in a flat voice.
Papa nods and goes to the kitchen. I hear the sink turned on. He’s washing the hospital off his hands. In a minute, he’ll feel he’s perfectly clean. Astonishing what a little water, soap, and propaganda can do.
“Will you sit with me and watch Groucho and Chico?” I ask the boy, and he gives me one of his big nods. Then, in sign language, he signals, “There’s a hole in my stomach.”
“I’ve made onion soup.” Smiling cheekily, I add, “I think that that’s someone’s favorite, but I can’t remember who.”
He leans his head into my chest and sniffs at my neck like a cat. He always loved to curl into Mama’s arms. And now that’s a role I’ll have to take on, which petrifies me.
“We’ll eat soup and then watch the goldfish,” I tell him. I look to my father, who has just returned to us. “And Papa will keep us company,” I add.
“Yes, of course,” he says.
Seeing my gratitude, he smiles. He believes I’ve reconsidered my anger and forgiven him. Bad eyesight, as he himself admitted.
I have a talk with Hansi that evening. I want to give him the chance to ask me about his operation. He’s sitting up in bed, getting ready to go to sleep, which is always the best time to get him to signal more than a few words. I’m sitting next to him and I’ve handed him the pad he uses to write down what he means when I don’t understand his sign language. We talk about school. He doesn’t mention his visit to the hospital. He tells me he’s learning to read music and play the recorder. He and another boy share an instrument.
“Who’s the other boy?”
“Volker,” he jots down.
“Maybe Volker could come to dinner sometime. Would you like that?”
He shrugs. The idea never even occurred to him.
“Can you get me his parents’ phone number?”
“Maybe.”
While I’m considering what two distant children might talk about when they’re alone, he notices the gash on my lip and reaches up with a forefinger to touch it, which makes me wince, t
hough now he’s as gentle as a whisper.
“Who hurt you?” he writes down, then gives me a worried look.
Despising my father frees me to fight in the war again, and the undeniable proof of that is that I wake up one morning with the Semitic Wall gone from my head. And the first thing I do is burn my swastika armband.
To celebrate my tossing those ashes out the window, I bake Mrs Munchenberg some Mandelschnitten—almond cookies. She has let her hair go gray, and she combs it into a crest at the front, which makes her look dramatic—an aging opera star who’s still the talk of the town. Framed photos of Raffi form a kind of altar on the wall above her couch. She asks me about my mother’s illness in a hushed voice, her hand over her mouth, as if not to wake the dead. Then I offer her my plate of cookies, which she takes with an embarrassed smile. “You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.”
“No trouble. And I’m not much of a baker, so don’t thank me yet.” She takes one and breaks it in half, and we munch together. “Delicious,” she says.
And there we are again, soldiers from a Remarque novel, sharing a cigarette at the front, which is why I say, “I think of Raffi all the time.”
She manages a fleeting smile.
“Come up anytime my father isn’t home,” I tell her. “We’ll have tea. Don’t worry about compromising me. I prefer being compromised.”
Over the coming months I mail Rini a dozen photographs that I cut from movie magazines—most memorably, Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo in Camille, a tearjerker that made me cry buckets.
She continues to sends me stills—mostly of half-forgotten silent film stars. One spring afternoon, a big, glossy one of Pola Negri as The Gypsy Dancer comes in the mail, autographed in blue pen. Pola has a dozen gold leaves for earrings and arabesque eyebrows—like butterfly wings. Where does Rini get such treasures?
Hansi and I go to visit K-H, Marianne, and Werner, who’s now three and a half years old, and who never, seemingly, runs out of steam. K-H takes photographs of me holding Werner in my arms down by the Spree. It’s a glorious day, and I’m as happy as I’ve been since Mama’s death. My hair has grown out by now and I keep it shoulder length. Hansi converses more with K-H and Marianne than he does with me, since they’re fluent in sign language, of course. Why didn’t I take him to see them earlier? Is it the jealousy in the pit of my stomach?
The Seventh Gate Page 40