Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  “You boys go ahead,” I suggested readily. “Suzy and I’ll take the train to Germany next week. Right, Suzy?”

  We’d already connected with our dates from Rome, and going out with them opened the door for other likely candidates. Suzy and I set forth an aggressive agenda of museums, galleries, and historic sites followed by dinner and dancing every night. Our skirts were hopelessly wrinkled, but every time we plugged in the travel iron, it blew out the lights on the entire floor of our shabby hotel, so we bought new evening dresses for dating and spent the days barelegged and frizzy haired in $3 jumpers from the straw market. It was mid-July now. By the time we left Florence, every zipper on every bag was broken. By the time we left Venice, neither of us had a decent pair of shoes.

  “My feet are ruined with all this walking,” Suzy remarked on the train to Munich. “Happily, my tush looks amazing.”

  “Oh, my God.” A headline caught my eye, and I picked up a British newspaper from the floor. “Suzy, Adlai Stevenson died.”

  She scootched close to read over my shoulder. The great statesman, whom JFK had appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had suffered a heart attack as he strolled down a London sidewalk with his UN colleague Marietta Tree.

  “I’ve heard he’s a deplorable womanizer, but still … it’s so sad,” said Suzy. “For some reason it makes home seem even more far away.”

  “We should try to find a New York Times every week, Suz. So we know what’s going on at home.”

  “Yes. With the space flight and everything. That’s a good idea.”

  Marietta Tree smiled up, chic as can be, from the rumpled newsprint. She was an object of some fascination for Suzy and me, a socialite who’d used her brains, style, and impeccable party skills to influence presidential politics and eventually gain appointment to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Somehow she’d managed to do everything right, while simultaneously doing a thousand things that simply aren’t done.

  “I hope we haven’t hurt Mike and David’s feelings,” said Suzy. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss them a little.”

  “I don’t. Some girls in Venice told me Munich is crawling with Canadian boys.” But I felt a flush of guilt and added, “Still … they’ve been awfully good about carrying things.”

  A nice German lady sat down next to us and was kind enough to spend the rest of the train ride tutoring me on my deutsche phrases. Our first night in Munich, we were slated to go out with the boys from UCLA, but Nebbish bowed out at the last minute. Suzy didn’t want to leave me alone at the hotel, but I insisted she go. The minute she was out the door, I got dressed and set out on my own. Knowing Suzy would plotz if she knew what I was up to made me feel even more ferociously elated. I found my way to a café where Americans were said to congregate, and sure enough, fell in with a group of Boston girls bound for a party at the Excelsior. I’d been successfully goosed a few times and was striking up a conversation with a chemistry teacher who looked like a surfer when I heard Suzy call my name.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said icily.

  Back at our hotel that night, we discovered our room was next to a bell tower, where a great, beefy bell tolled every fifteen minutes like Quasimodo’s life depended on it. We lay in the dark, dozing for a few minutes, getting gonged awake, dozing again. Toward dawn, Suzy groaned into her pillow.

  “My nerves are shot to hell. We have to find another place to stay.”

  “It won’t be hard to find something. The German people are so friendly and helpful.”

  “They should be,” Suzy huffed. “All things considered.”

  I knew what she meant, but I’d been trying not to think about it.

  “I hear you get free beer on the brewery tour,” I said. “The best beer in the world.”

  “Well,” Suzy sniffed. “It’s nice they can happily go about making beer after—”

  The bell tolled, echoing off the walls. It disturbed me to hear Suzy sound so hard. She was a baby during the last two years of the war, and I was born just as it ended. In that brief period of time, the whole world changed. Everyone at the temple had lost family in the Holocaust: extended family, third cousins, great-grand-aunts and uncles-in-law—people unknown to us but dear to those we held dear. We grew up keenly aware that those were Our People, who looked like us and shared our blood and our beliefs. Mom and Daddy were less than thrilled to have Suzy and me spend time in this place that was such a fresh hell in their memories. I’d brushed it off before we left, but now I understood, and I couldn’t bear to connect such dark history with the generous laughter of the old man in the bakery shop or the kindly tutoring of the woman on the train.

  “How could good people get swept up in such a thing?” Suzy wondered.

  “I don’t know. They probably don’t know themselves.”

  In Paris, I’d felt the lingering voices of la Résistance; Germany echoed with something else altogether. I couldn’t begin to grasp what that feeling was, having come from a community where most people listened to their better angels, but now perhaps I’d equate it with having cancer. What begins as a small, unsettled dread, grows to a terrifying certainty and quickly becomes desperation. This malignancy threatens everything, but it’s part of you. To kill it is to kill an aspect of yourself. The normal human response is thrashing anger, a need to blame, throat-gripping fear, and lashing efforts at self-preservation. What’s left, if one survives, is a scarred heart of fear and sadness, the feeling of having been rocked on one’s foundation, and a grim determination to make life normal again.

  “Suzy.”

  “Yes, Nan?”

  “You know what they call the sleeping car on the train?”

  “No, what?”

  “Schlafwagen.” For some reason, we broke into a fit of giggles over that.

  “You’re such a nut,” said Suzy. “What does Schlafwagen have to do with anything?”

  “Nichts,” I said. The bell tolled, and we broke into another inexplicable fit of giggles.

  “I heard from that nice man we met in Italy. I told him I’d go out with him tomorrow night if he brings a friend for you.”

  I huffed, indignant. “I can get a date on my own.”

  “I know, Nanny, but I want us to stick together. Some of these guys are so phony-baloney. Not just Europeans. American tourists and ex-pats, too. In fact, as far as I’ve observed, men are pretty much the same all over the world. It’s fine to go out and have a good time, but we can meet guys anywhere. I’m here to see as much of Europe as I can. I don’t want you to be so distracted chasing boys that you miss everything.”

  Later that week, two men got into a fistfight over Suzy, breaking stuff all over the Hofbräuhaus, but other than that, we found everyone in Munich to be wonderfully kind and pleasant. Suzy and I explored museums and funny little galleries tucked between butcher shops and bakeries, staring for hour after fascinated hour at images from the grotesque movement that had influenced German art in the decades leading up to World War II. Suzy moved quickly past a series of Otto Dix etchings of twisted soldiers in bulky gas masks. The unsettling undercurrents were palpable, even in the portraiture. Tortured colors, nightmare expressions. The postwar art was even more conflicted. We stood in front of an installation of black-and-white photographs, searching the meticulous compositions and corners, trying to understand how such great shame and such great dignity could possibly coexist. I thought of Suzy’s mandate over my broken suitcase.

  Ropes are the answer.

  There were times, I decided, when redemption could be found only in the simple act of keeping it together.

  Suzy seemed to have a homing beacon for the small galleries and arty coffeehouses, and in these less stately places, the so-called “degenerate art”—entartete Kunst—that had been ridiculed and confiscated by the Third Reich enjoyed a triumphant return from exile. In 1937, the “decadent work of Bolsheviks and Jews,” which included works by Picasso and Kandinsky, had been exhibited in Mun
ich alongside paintings by psychotics and schizophrenics. Some of the sixteen thousand works were auctioned off in Switzerland and America to finance the efforts of the Nazi Party. The rest were burned.

  “I can’t stand to think what was lost,” said Suzy. “Art is the soul of a people. I don’t know if it’s possible to get that back.”

  We met up with Dave and Mike and drove the heavily laden VW to Berlin.

  In 1961, the government of East Germany had reinforced the expanse of electrified barbed wire with 26 miles of concrete that separated family members, friends, and neighbors who’d once lived in the same city. In the pubs at night we heard stories about how the West Berliners posted Christmas trees on pedestals and sang carols over the Wall. The East Berliners had been forbidden to wave at West Berlin friends and family, so groups of housewives conspired to all wash windows at the same time. (It’s laughable, really: those fat old colonels in their war rooms imagining they were any match for the kaffeeklatsch ingenuity of womankind.)

  Travel between East and West Germany had been severely restricted since the iron curtain had descended, but during this brief window of opportunity, we were able to get permission to go into East Germany for a few hours. (Permission from the German government, that is, not our parents. We decided they’d be happier not knowing until we had the photos developed.) We made our way through Checkpoint Charlie under the hard stares of heavily armed soldiers and snarling dogs. At the border, we were thoroughly searched, interrogated, and warned about the consequences of overstaying our welcome or making any attempt to abet the escape of East Germans. Foreigners were known to alter the undercarriages of their cars to accommodate illegal passengers, so guards routinely measured frames and fuel tanks. If they found any discrepancy, the car was dismantled and the travelers arrested.

  Facing the Berlin Wall on its eastern side was a façade of tidy prefabricated buildings, but beyond that, the city was scarred with rust and studded with wreckage from the war that hadn’t yet ended for the people who lived there. We drove past toppled bricks and jutting rebar, sagging shingles rotting in the sun, women in worn-out dresses scolding their children out of the street, men with downcast faces standing in line for whatever compels desperate men to stand docilely in lines. Dave occasionally pointed out monuments and architectural features, but for the most part, we rode in silence. Huddled in the backseat of the VW, Suzy and I held our breath and swallowed our tears. The atmosphere of despair was overwhelming.

  But every once in a while, I felt a nudge of Suzy’s elbow, and she’d nod toward an alley where children played or a doorway where a couple paused to kiss. Because even in a horrid, rusty snow globe of a city, laughter and kisses can be found. In the midst of injustice, poverty, oppression—in the midst of cancer—small, sweet things take on remarkable proportion. This was my first inkling of that.

  We made our way out of the city and sped west along the winding road. The speed limit on most stretches of the Autobahn was 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour, but we were warned that some stretches were in ill repair, and lower limits there were harshly enforced by the Volkspolizei. This was a beautiful country. I wanted to love the thick woods and green hills, but it was impossible to see a single wildflower without thinking about the fear and sorrow that permeated the soil. It was impossible to feel anything but humbly grateful for the outrageous privilege of living in darling old Peoria in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

  Along the hilly roadsides in Spain, we’d seen the layers of civilization one on top of the other. In Medina-Sidonia, Suzy had waved to me from the bell tower of an ancient cathedral that was built on top of a ruined mosque, which was built on top of a ruined Roman temple. On the Autobahn, skimming over freshly repaired cement, then bumping over stretches of old road where the asphalt had buckled beneath the caterpillar treads of the retreating tanks, we saw those layers of history being laid down, a vivid illustration of old and new, destruction and construction, victory and defeat, on and on through circling years.

  As darkness fell, we crossed back into the free world, and I was overwhelmed with a very grown-up love and appreciation for my own country. Never in my life had I ever been so piercingly aware of the pure sweetness of freedom, the magnitude of what it meant to me to be an American. Never for a moment since have I taken that privilege for granted.

  One of the great gifts of our journey was the opportunity to view our own country through the lens of another culture. Surveying ages of creative process, knowing the history tangled up in it, Suzy and I could plainly see how the stirrings in music, art, and fashion both foreshadowed and echoed political movements. The world tilted with plunging necklines and shoes that showed a little ankle. Degenerate art kicked Hitler’s you-know-what and remained standing long after all the fallen armies of righteous Aryan wrath.

  Seeing all this from the tourist’s perspective, I suddenly looked over my shoulder and saw the music, art, and fashion shifting in my own country. The skirts getting shorter and the hair getting longer. Jazz music and beat poetry. Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. There was a feeling of unrest, spirits on the move. It made some people uncomfortable, but I wasn’t afraid. Suzy and I were just beginning to understand where we fit in the world, wondering how—or even if—it was possible for our lives to make a difference. To my mind, the most exciting thing in the world was civilized dissent and the dynamic of change. It meant people were alive and fully engaged, that people cared.

  If Germany held one lesson for me, it’s that apathy is more dangerous than any ideology.

  Our survey of European men—I mean art, of course, art and culture—was a resounding success. Very educational. Back in West Berlin, we made our way from hotel to hotel, art gallery to museum, historic site to train station. It was unseasonably cold, but we didn’t want to spend money on new coats, so we hustled down the drizzly streets huddled close together under one umbrella, my arm across Suzy’s shoulder, her arm around my waist.

  Logistics, directions, and connections were a constant juggling act. Everything is so touch-of-a-button nowadays that we often fail to appreciate what a gift it is to be connected to the bank in the blink of an eye or to hear a loved one’s voice at the flip of a switch. Of course, what I failed to appreciate back then was that this would be my best, biggest experience of both Suzy and the world. This was truly the only time we spent together, just the two of us, as grown single women, and had I experienced the dramedy with anyone other than Suzy, it wouldn’t have been the grand falling-in-love-with-everything adventure that it was.

  We had dates every night in Germany.

  “Darling boys. Nice Jewish men,” Suzy reassured Mom, stretching that definition to include an Irish Catholic guy named Israel.

  Our last night in Berlin, we had dinner in a restaurant where John F. Kennedy had eaten pig knuckles on the same famed trip during which he declared himself to be a jelly doughnut.

  “He should have said Ich bin Berliner instead of Ich bin ein Berliner,” Boppie had explained to me at the time, but later I read that, while certain members of the American press romped on the alleged faux pas, Berliners themselves didn’t bat an eyelash, since they actually call the pastry Pfannkuchen. And if one wanted to parse the minute nuances of German grammar, Kennedy’s usage was correct, anyway, because he wasn’t literally “from Berlin.”

  Sitting in the pig knuckle place less than two years after JFK was assassinated, I wondered at how one small word (not even a verb or a noun, but a mere article!) could balloon into an embarrassment and in the context of another moment—pop—it was rendered small again, almost endearing. It made me think about the power of language and legacy, how one could be so swiftly transformed in public perception from king of Camelot to jelly doughnut to martyr and then to a memory that digested all of this efficiently but reflected none of it accurately.

  When I tried to express all this to Suzy on the way to Copenhagen, she sighed and pressed her fingertips against her temple.

  “N
an. Calm down. You’re either raging about politics or chasing everything in pants.”

  “Why do you have to be such a prude?”

  “Because I’m the big sister. You don’t how difficult it is. But so be it.” She made a magnanimous gesture. “As long as my strength holds, I’ll watch out for you.”

  The boys dropped us off and went to Brussels. We’d missed our check-in time at the hotel in Copenhagen, so the clerk referred us to a pleasant family home for $4 a night, including a grand, starchy breakfast, after which we trooped off in search of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid.

  “I wish we’d known sooner that we could stay in someone’s home,” said Suzy. “You learn more about the local sights and meet these interesting people. Europeans are so grown up. Culturally, I mean. Everyone here knows at least three languages. Nan, let’s study French and German together. Let’s speak at least three—”

  Suzy froze in the middle of the sidewalk and pointed to a sign above the storefront.

  Uhren & Schmuck.

  We died laughing. Not very cultured of us, I know. Suzy consulted her phrase book. It means “watches and jewelry.” We couldn’t help ourselves; every time we saw another Uhren & Schmuck sign, we went to pieces.

  The family in Copenhagen referred us to the Barton family in Amsterdam. They welcomed us warmly and fed us another lumberjack breakfast. During the thirty-five-minute tram ride into the city, we met two darling Danes, who escorted us to the Anne Frank House and Rijksmuseum. After dinner, we strolled down Canal Street, where the ladies of the night waved from their windows. Somehow, in the context of all that Vermeer and Brueghel, even the prostitutes seemed as rosy, plump, and healthy as apple crisp with powdered sugar.

  The next day, we went to the Jewish Quarter around the Water-looplein. Jews from Portugal, Poland, and Germany had taken refuge there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rembrandt and his wife had lived there, and we visited the home where he spent his happiest, most productive years, painting scenes from the Bible and re-creating the simple loveliness he saw as he walked along the canals. Before the war, about 140,000 people populated the quaint neighborhood, flourishing in pleasant shops and busy businesses. After the Holocaust, about 28,000 remained, and now a wide swath was being razed to make room for a modern expressway.