Travellers in Magic

by Lisa Goldstein

  “What happened to Hansel and Gretel?” I asked Sarah. “The children drop breadcrumbs instead of stones the next time, and the birds eat the breadcrumbs so they can’t find their way back, and then—”

  “Then they meet the witch,” Sarah said. “I’ve read it to the kids at school hundreds of times.”

  “And the witch tries to—to cook them—”

  “To cook Hansel. Oh my God, Lynne, she was talking about the ovens. The ovens in the camps.”

  “Oh, come on. She’d never even seen them.”

  “No, but her parents had. She must have been trying to imagine it.”

  “That’s too easy. It was the children who were threatened with the oven in the story, not the parents. And just because you try to imagine it doesn’t mean everyone else does.”

  “I used to think they looked like those ovens in the pizza parlor. Remember? They took us there a lot when we were kids. Long rows of shelves, black and hot. I wondered what it would be like to have to get into one.”

  I thought of the four of us, sitting in a darkened noisy pizza parlor, laughing at something one of us had just said. And all the while my little sister Sarah had been watching the ovens, imagining herself burning.

  “Don’t tell me you never thought of it,” she said.

  “No, not really.”

  “You’re kidding. It happened. We have to face the fact that it happened.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have to dwell on it.”

  “How can you ignore—”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I think. If I had survived something like that, the camps, or having been in hiding, I would be grateful. I would think each day was a miracle, really. It would be a miracle to be alive.”

  “And what about the people who died? The survivors feel guilty just for being alive.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have books about it. Do you want to see what the ovens looked like?” She stood and headed toward her bookshelves, and I saw, alarmed, that she had a whole shelf of books on the concentration camps.

  “No, I don’t.”

  She stopped but did not sit back down. “What must that be like, not to have a home?”

  “She does have a home. It’s here with us.”

  “You know what I mean. A whole generation was wiped out, a whole community. All their traditions and stories and memories and customs.”

  “She has stories—”

  “But she made them all up. She doesn’t even have stories of her own—she forgot all the ones her parents told her.”

  “Come on—those were great stories. Don’t you remember?”

  “That’s not the point. She’d lost everything. Dad was always having to tell her about Jewish holidays and customs. She’d forgotten it all.”

  “She remembered Hansel and Gretel,” I said, and for once Sarah had no answer.

  A few days later my father called to tell me that my mother was better. She would stay in the hospital for more tests, but he thought that she would be going home soon. I was surprised at the news; at the back of my mind I had been certain she would never return. Perhaps I had absorbed some of Sarah’s pessimism.

  The day she came home I invited the family over for dinner. My place was larger than Sarah’s, with a dining table and dishes and silverware that matched. Still, when I looked around the apartment to make sure everything was ready, I realized I had pared down my life as much as my sister had. I had no close friends at the software company where I worked, I had never dated any man for longer than six months, and I had not lived with anyone since moving away from my family. I never discussed politics or gave my opinion on current events. In Berkeley, California, perhaps the most political city in the United States, I had never put a bumper sticker on my car, or worn a campaign button, or come out for one candidate over another. These things were no one’s business but my own.

  I had even, I saw now, started to drift away from Sarah. My sister’s words came back to me, but they weren’t very funny this time: What if I have to flee?

  My parents had dressed up for dinner, as if they were going to a party. My mother wore an outfit I remembered, a violet-gray suit, a gray silk blouse and a scarf of violet gauze, but it was far too large on her. Her skin was the gray-white color of ashes, and her blue veins stood out sharply on her neck and the inside of her wrists. I had seen her in the hospital and was not shocked at the changes; instead I felt pity, and a kind of squeamish horror at what she was going through.

  I don’t remember much of that dinner, really, just that my mother ate little, and that we all made nervous conversation to avoid the one thing uppermost in all our minds. And that my mother said she wanted to hike through Muir Woods, a favorite spot of hers. Sarah and I quickly volunteered to take her, both of us treating her request as the last wish of a dying woman. As, for all we knew, it was.

  It was sunny the day I drove my sister and mother across the San Rafael Bridge to Marin County and up Mount Tamalpais. The road wound up past the dry, bleached grass of the mountainside. Then, as we went higher, this began to give way to old shaded groves of eucalyptus and redwood. Light shot through the branches and scattered across the car.

  We parked at the entrance to Muir Woods. It was a weekday and so the place was not too crowded, though the tourists had come out in force. We went past the information booth and the cafeteria, feeling a little smug. We did not need information because we knew the best places to hike, and we had packed a lunch.

  There is a well-worn circular trail through the woods that brings you back to the parking lot, and there are paths that branch off from this trail, taking you away from the crowds. We chose one of these paths and began to hike through the trees. Squares and lozenges of light fell over us. The ground was patterned in the green and brown and gold of damp leaves and twigs and moss. We could hear a brook somewhere beneath us, but as we climbed higher up the mountain the sound faded and we heard only the birds, calling to one another.

  After a while my mother began to lag behind and Sarah and I stopped, pretending we were tired. We sat on a rock and took out the sandwiches. When I gave my mother hers I brushed against her hand; her skin was as cold as glass. We ate in silence for a while.

  “There’s no good way to say this, I suppose,” my mother said. Sarah and I stopped eating and looked up, watchful as deer. “You children had an uncle. My brother.”

  Whatever revelation we were expecting, it was not this one. “You would have liked him, I think,” my mother said. “He loved children—he would have spoiled you both rotten. His name was Johann.”

  Uncle Johann, I thought. It sounded as distant as a character in a novel. “What happened to him?” Sarah asked.

  “We were both adopted by a Christian family,” my mother said, and I saw that for once she would not need prompting to tell this story, that she had probably rehearsed it over and over in her mind. “You remember, the one I told you about. And then when we were old enough we began to work in the factory, making the vacuum tubes. Once I dropped some of the liquid glass on my foot—molten glass, is that the right word? I still have the scar there.” She pointed to her right foot. The scar, which I had never noticed, was hidden by the hiking shoe.

  “Everyone laughed, I suppose because I was new at the work, and so clumsy. But Johann came to my side immediately, and put towels soaked in cold water on the burn.”

  She did not look at either of us as she spoke. It was as if she were compelled to tell the story to its end, without stopping. Yet her voice was level and calm, and I could not help but think that she might as well be telling us one of her fabulous stories.

  “Johann was a little hotheaded, I think. At home he would talk about sabotage, about making vacuum tubes that didn’t work or even about blowing up the factory, though I don’t know where he would have gotten the dynamite. He talked about his connections in the Underground. We were together nearly all the time, in the factory and at home, and I knew that he had no connections. But I c
ould not help but worry about him—the Germans were taking younger and younger men into the army as the war began to turn against them, and I knew that soon it would be Johann’s turn.

  “Near the end of the war, as more and more young men were drafted, the Germans brought in prisoners from the labor camps to work in the factory. We knew that these prisoners were probably Jews, and it made Johann angry to see how they were treated—they had to work longer hours than we did, and had less to eat at the midday break. He wanted to do something for them, to contact them in some way.

  “We got into horrible arguments about it. You must understand that we hardly ever talked to our fellow workers for fear of giving ourselves away, and so the only company we had was each other. We had become like two prisoners who had shared the same cell for far too long—for a time we could not say anything without giving offense.

  “I told him I thought these prisoners were better off than the ones in the camps, because by this time we had begun to hear terrible rumors about what went on in those places. I said that he could do nothing for them, that he would only raise their hopes if he went to talk to them, and that he would be putting himself in danger for nothing. And I pointed out that they didn’t speak German anyway—they seemed to be mostly Hungarians and Poles.

  “As I said, we couldn’t speak to each other without causing pain. He called me a coward. He said—oh, it was horrible—he said that I had lived among the Germans for so long that I had begun to think like one, that I believed myself superior to these people. And—and he said more, too, of a similar nature.”

  I noticed that my mother had said it was horrible, but that her expression and her tone still did not change. And that she did not stop telling her story but continued on as calmly as though she were reading it from a book. Her fingers picked at the sandwich, dropping pieces of it on the ground.

  “So I didn’t speak to him for a week. I had only my foster parents to speak to, and I—well, I was an adolescent, with an adolescent’s certain, impatient opinions about the world, and I had started to hate my adopted family. They were Germans, weren’t they? And so at least partly responsible for this war and the dreadful things that were happening. I had heard the remarks my fellow workers made about the Jews at the factory, and I thought my foster parents must feel the same way. So what if they had saved my life, and my brother’s life? Perhaps I hated them for that too, for their courage and generosity.

  “Was Johann right? I don’t know. We might have been able to help these people, but I can’t think how. Perhaps if everyone who felt the way my brother did had done something—I don’t know.

  “We used to walk each other home when our shift ended, but now I started going home by myself. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to anyone. I felt that I was alone, that no one understood me. The war might not have existed, I was so deeply buried within myself.

  “There was a young man at the factory, a German, who began to watch me as I worked, who always seemed to be next to me when I turned around. I thought he was a spy, that he knew my secret. You children, oh, you’ve lived such a pampered life—you have no idea what we went through. We had to suspect everyone, everyone. Then one of the women who worked near me said, ‘I think Franz is in love with you.’

  “Of course I hated him—I don’t have to tell you that. He was a German. It’s strange, isn’t it? We had such strong feelings about each other, and we had never spoken a word together.

  “When he saw that Johann and I had stopped walking home together he started to wait for me at the end of my shift. I tried everything I could to avoid him, but some days it just wasn’t possible. I was terrified that he would make some remark about the Jews working in the factory, and that I would not be able to contain myself and somehow give myself away. After a week of this I was desperate to make up with Johann again, to have everything the way it had been before. I hadn’t forgotten what he had said to me, but I had convinced myself that it didn’t matter. Well, you’ve been an adolescent too—you know how quickly you can change your feelings about something.

  “I managed to avoid Franz and I waited outside the factory when my shift ended. But Johann didn’t come out. Soon all my fellow workers had gone home, and the new shift had started, and I still didn’t see Johann. I went back inside.

  “Did I ever tell you what the factory looked like? It looked like hell. Whenever people say anything about hell I always nod, because I know what they’re talking about. The place was huge, with low ceilings and almost no light to work by, just the yellow flames of the gas jets. It was hot in winter and like a furnace in summer, with everyone’s jet on all the time. We dipped into the big vats of liquid glass and blew our tubes, and that was all we did, eight and nine hours a day. We were allowed to sit down only at the midday meal.

  “At first I couldn’t find Johann at all. Then I saw that he was walking over to the part of the factory where the Jews worked, and that when the guard looked away he passed a note to one of the prisoners. The other man read it and then turned on his jet of fire and burned it. And neither of them had looked at the other.

  “Johann grinned when he saw me and said, ‘It’s all taken care of.’ I wondered what he meant, but I was so glad he was talking to me again that I didn’t really care. And maybe he had been right; maybe he could do something for these people.

  “When we left the factory I saw that I hadn’t gotten rid of Franz after all—he was waiting for me at the door to the factory, and he was smiling, as if he knew something. Had he seen Johann? But I felt something of my brother’s confidence, and I put Franz out of my mind until the next day.

  “Franz sat next to me during the midday break. ‘What is your brother doing?’ he asked.

  “ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. I am a very poor liar; I had always dreaded the thought of someone, anyone, asking me questions.

  “ ‘I saw him the other day talking to the Jews,’ Franz said. To this day I cannot stand to hear a German say the word ‘Jew’—‘Jude,’ they say, in that horrible accent.”

  She did not seem to realize that that “horrible accent” was her own as well. I said nothing.

  “What was wrong with Johann? Franz asked. He leaned closer to me and raised his voice at the same time. I was desperate to ask him to speak quietly but I could say nothing, or his suspicions would fall on me. Was Johann a Jew-lover? Some kind of spy?

  “I felt battered by his questions. He became more offensive. Why did I never leave my brother’s side? Was I in love with him? Was I a Jew-lover as well? If I knew something about my brother’s activities I had better go to the authorities and tell them, hadn’t I?

  “Then he said something I have thought about every day of my life. ‘I might just go to the authorities with what I know,’ he said.

  “ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid. He hasn’t done anything.’

  “ ‘Good,’ Franz said. ‘You’ll stop me, won’t you?’

  “It’s obvious to me today that he wanted to—to blackmail me. That he wanted me to walk home with him, or he would report Johann. And probably he wanted more as well, wanted sex, though I tried not to think of that at the time. I was young, and very sheltered, and even the thought of having to speak to him made me shudder with disgust. So I convinced myself that that could not be what he meant, and that he had no proof against Johann. And, for all I knew, Johann had not done anything. So I avoided Franz, and a week passed, and I began to relax.

  “Only once in all that time did Franz try to contact me. He walked by me and gave me a note, and I burned it without reading it. I thought that that would tell him I wanted nothing more to do with him, and that he would leave us alone.

  “But the next day when we came to work the prisoner who had gotten Johann’s note was gone. Johann noticed it first, and I felt him become stiff with fear beside me, terrified to go to his place in the factory. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  “ ‘You don’t know anything about anything,’ Johann said.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell them that.’

  “ ‘What’s happened?’ I said, but at that moment three men in the uniform of the Gestapo came into the factory, and Johann began to run.

  “One man guarded the door, so the only place Johann could go was up the stairs. There were several floors above us—I think they were offices—but we were not allowed to go off the first floor and so I had never seen them. Johann must have run as far as he could go, until he was trapped, and then they brought him back down—” She was crying now, but her expression still had not changed. She wiped at her eye with her hand. “I saw him on a Red Cross list after the war. He had died in Auschwitz.”

  Sarah and I said nothing. We were not a family used to confidences, to strong emotion. I wondered how my mother could have kept this story from us for so many years, and what I could possibly say to her. And I remembered Sarah’s question—“Do you think she was happy?”—and I thought that nothing could be more irrelevant to her life.

  “Does Dad know?” Sarah asked finally.

  “I think so,” my mother said.

  You think so? I thought, horrified. How had she told him? With hints and misdirection, just as she had always answered our questions, until finally he suspected the worst? But my mother had become silent. We would get no more stories today. For the first time I thought she looked very old.

  We began to walk back. Had Gretel, I wondered, come back to the forest with her daughter? Many years later, when she was an old woman and tired of secrets, had she taken her daughter by the hand and followed the old path? What could she have said to her?

  “This is where our parents left us, in that clearing by the brook. And here’s where we saw the cottage. Look there—the trees have come and claimed it. And this is where the oven was, this place where all the leaves seem burnt and dry. We saw these things when we were young, too young, I guess, and all we knew was terror. But there were miracles too, and we survived. And look—here is the path that you can take yourself.”