“What do you mean, Mrs. Goldschmidt?”
Behind her the man said: “Hilda, what is it?”
Mrs. Goldschmidt made an impatient noise with her tongue and unhooked the chain. Matthias and Nina stepped into the room.
A small room: a couch and chair along one wall, stove and refrigerator along the other. Framed photographs hung in one corner, all showing a man with dark hair and a dark mustache, thin and unsmiling. Beneath the photographs sat an old man in a wheelchair. He looked no bigger than Mrs. Goldschmidt, perhaps even smaller. He wore a blue shirt buttoned to the neck and a brown woolen tie; a blanket covered him from the waist down. He had soft white hair and soft dark eyes.
“This is Mr. Goldschmidt,” the old woman said. “My husband.”
“Matthias,” Matthias said, crossing the room and shaking hands. Mr. Goldschmidt’s pale hand disappeared in Matthias’s tanned one, reappeared, slipped back under the blanket.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said. He looked at Nina and smiled. He had a nice smile. “And this is your wife?” he said.
“No,” Matthias replied. “Nina Kitchener. Mr. and Mrs. Goldschmidt.”
Mr. Goldschmidt smiled at her. “A Jewish girl.”
“No,” Nina said.
“And so pretty,” Mr. Goldschmidt continued, seeming not to have heard her. “Please sit.”
Nina and Matthias sat on the couch. Mrs. Goldschmidt stood frowning by the door. Then she closed it, moved slowly to the chair and sat down: on the edge, upright and stiff.
“Did you know my son, Mr. Matthias?” the old man said.
“No. I was away when he …”
“Died?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be afraid of saying the word, Mr. Matthias. If it’s the truth.” Nina saw how closely the old man was watching Matthias at that moment.
“It’s the truth,” Matthias said.
The old man tried to smile again, but it wouldn’t come. He gestured to the photographs around him. “Then look,” he said. “That is Felix.”
They looked, and saw: Felix sitting on a bench with a stack of books beside him; Felix bent over a chessboard; Felix at the wheel of a Deux Chevaux; Felix writing on a blackboard—he had underlined the words “avant le pogrom”; Felix in cap and gown shaking hands with another man in cap and gown.
Mr. Goldschmidt had swung his wheelchair around and was gazing at the photographs too. “He was a professor. A full professor.”
“Mr. Matthias knows already,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt.
“A full professor at the University of Aix,” the old man continued, as though he hadn’t heard her.
“Aix-en-Provence?” Nina said.
Mr. Goldschmidt wheeled round to face her. “Is it so surprising?”
“No. It’s just—”
“Felix was brilliant. He won fourth place in all of Paris in the bac. As a boy, he could add vast sums in his head.” He licked his lips. “Three-hundred-and-eighty-two plus seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven plus two-hundred-and-six plus one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eleven equals?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” Matthias said.
Mr. Goldschmidt turned to Nina. “Equals?”
“I don’t know.”
“Felix would know. Felix could tell you.”
Mr. Goldschmidt’s face had reddened and his blanket had slipped to the floor, revealing skinny legs, the color of bone; he was in his underwear. Mrs. Goldschmidt crossed the room and replaced the blanket, tucking it around his fleshless hips. “This gentleman and lady aren’t interested in such stories, Pinchas.”
“I’m interested,” Matthias said. “I’m interested in Felix.”
The old man smiled. “Good,” he said. “It’s good to talk about Felix.”
“Then tell me what Felix was doing in the Bahamas.”
Mr. Goldschmidt glanced at his wife. “We know nothing about that,” she said.
“How did he know Happy Standish?”
“I told you before. The name is unknown to me.”
“Hiram Standish, Junior.”
“This is someone else?”
“The same man.”
“And the same answer.”
There was a silence. Nina saw Matthias looking first at the old woman, then at the old man. She didn’t know anything about Felix Goldschmidt, didn’t know what Matthias was aiming at. But she knew that the Standishes had controlled the Human Fertility Institute, and anything about them concerned her. So she turned to Matthias and asked: “When did the diving accident happen?”
“A year ago September,” he said. “September third.”
“Happy Standish was in Aix in July, covering a festival of North African music for The Village Voice,” Nina said. “I’ve seen the clipping.”
Something changed in Matthias’s eyes; they fixed on her, expressing complexities there was no time to analyze. Then he spoke to Mrs. Goldschmidt: “Is that when they met?” Mrs. Goldschmidt said nothing, but she was twisting Felix’s plastic cards in her hands again.
Matthias got up and approached her. He dwarfed the old woman. She backed away: backed away from his size, his bloody face, his questions. He stopped. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Then go away, please.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?” she said. “Why can you not do that?”
“You may not want to know what happened to your son, Mrs. Goldschmidt. That’s your right. But he wasn’t the only one who died. I want the people who did it to feel the consequences.”
Mrs. Goldschmidt’s eyes again filled with tears. “These people feel no consequences,” she said. Again the tears dried up. Bitterness sharpened her tone. “You are an innocent.”
Matthias’s tone remained mild. “Give me the chance to prove you wrong,” he said.
“Please, Hilda,” said Mr. Goldschmidt, wheeling his chair toward her. The blanket caught under the wheels, slipped off him, revealing the skeletal legs. “Please.”
“God in heaven,” Mrs. Goldschmidt said. Her eyes filled with tears once more. This time they overflowed. The old woman covered her face with her hands and began sobbing hoarse, ragged sobs. The plastic cards fell to the floor. Nina rose and picked them up. She picked up the blanket too, and covered Mr. Goldschmidt’s legs.
“Shayna maidel,” he whispered to her: “Shayna maidel.”
“Yes,” cried Mrs. Goldschmidt. “Yes, yes, that’s when they met. Horrid day.” She ran from the room. Nina thought of going after her. Mr. Goldschmidt laid his icy hand on hers.
“No,” he said. “It’s good. She cries.” He wheeled himself back to the corner. Matthias pulled back the curtain, looked out. Nina sat on the couch and drew a calendar in her mind. July: Happy meets Felix. September: Happy falls into a coma, Felix dies. October: Laura is impregnated in Boston. February: Nina impregnated in New York. Like the calendar of an alien culture it resisted interpretation.
The walls of the Goldschmidts’ apartment were thin. Sounds came clearly to the living room: water running in a sink, a drawer opening and closing, footsteps. Mrs. Goldschmidt returned with a Kleenex tucked inside the wrist of her sweater and a worn briefcase in her hand. Without a word, she gave the briefcase to Matthias. He sat beside Nina, opened it and withdrew the contents.
Contents: a manuscript, not quite as thick as Living Without Men and Children … and Loving It; a few loose pages that appeared to be Xeroxes of official documents. Nina read the title page of the manuscript. Wilhelm von Trautschke: Histoire d’un Homme de la Science Moderne. She looked at the copies of the documents. One had a swastika at the top, all were in German, all had the name Wilhelm von Trautschke displayed somewhere on the page.
Matthias flipped through the pages of the manuscript. “I don’t read French,” he said.
“I do,” Nina said. She scanned a paragraph that seemed to be a description of the structure of the department of medicine at the University of Heidelberg after World War I.
“Do you know of this
man, von Trautschke?” asked Mr. Goldschmidt.
“The obstetrician who invented the fertility drug?” said Nina.
Mrs. Goldschmidt snorted. “Obstetrician.”
“What do you mean?” Nina said.
“The fertility drug. Such a blessing.” Suddenly she reached down and snatched the manuscript out of Matthias’s hands. “You do not understand. Perhaps you cannot understand. This is a masterpiece. Felix’s masterpiece.”
“A biography of von Trautschke?” Matthias said.
Mrs. Goldschmidt hugged it to her breast. “What better subject for biography in such a world?” she said. “Obstetrician,” she repeated. “Even he did not so describe himself.”
“What did he call himself?” Nina asked.
“A eugenicist,” Mrs. Goldschmidt answered. “Do you know what that is?”
“I think so,” Nina said.
“You think so. And do you also know that there are two kinds of eugenics, positive and negative?”
“No.”
“No. No, she says. Well, young woman, Dr. von Trautschke knew. He was expert at both. Expert. Positive and negative. Breeding and weeding, he called them.” Her voice rose, high and bitter.
“Hilda,” said her husband. She took a deep breath, then went to him, put her hand on his shoulder, squeezed it. Mr. Goldschmidt looked at Nina. “We knew him, you see.”
“Von Trautschke?”
“Yes. He worked on Block Ten.”
“Block Ten?” Nina said.
“Where they did the medical experiments,” Matthias told her quietly. “At Auschwitz.”
“Mazel tov,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt. “A goy who has heard of Block Ten.”
“Hilda,” said Mr. Goldschmidt.
“Mazel tov,” she said. “I mean it.”
“Hilda.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Goldschmidt,” Matthias said. He rubbed the side of his face; Nina saw him feel something and look with surprise at the blood on his hand. “You were there,” he said to Mrs. Goldschmidt.
“We were,” she replied.
“And Felix?”
“Not Felix.”
“He was born after the war?”
“No,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt. “That would have been impossible. Felix was born in 1941. Mr. Goldschmidt and I were taken to the Vélodrome in 1942, but we were able to get Felix safely away to a friend in the country.”
“Then you were sent to Auschwitz.”
“That’s what happened to the Vélodrome people.”
“And …”
“And?”
“And von Trautschke was there?”
“Oh, yes. He was there.” Mrs. Goldschmidt stood beside her husband, gently kneading his shoulders. He watched the conversation going back and forth.
Matthias rose, crossed the room, peered through the curtains. Then he walked back across the room, leaned against the wall. He was too big for the Goldschmidts’ apartment, too heavy for their floor: it creaked under his weight. “I hate to drag you through this,” he said.
“But you are planning to anyway,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt.
“Hilda,” said her husband.
“I am,” Matthias told her. “I know how much you don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to remember. But I am.”
Mrs. Goldschmidt’s voice rose. “How do you know that? How can you know that?”
“I was in a prison camp myself once. Not a death camp. Nothing like Auschwitz. But people died there, and I don’t like to talk about it either.”
They all looked at him. He leaned against the door, nose crooked, face bloody. A good face, Nina thought.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt. Her hands never stopped rubbing her husband’s shoulders. “We were on Block Ten. Dr. von Trautschke … used us in his experiments.”
Mr. Goldschmidt reached for his wife’s hand, patted it. “But we were among the lucky ones, sir,” he said. “We didn’t die.”
Mrs. Goldschmidt pulled her hand away. “We died,” she said.
Mr. Goldschmidt stiffened in his wheelchair. Then his eyes glazed and he hung his head.
“What do you expect?” asked Mrs. Goldschmidt. “When a man who calls himself a doctor—an obstetrician, as you put it—injects caustic liquids into your fallopian tubes, and you are a young woman, full of life—and yes, sexual desire, Pinchas, why not say it?—you die, even if you walk out afterwards. And when this man who calls himself a doctor tapes your husband’s scrotum to a plate and bombards it with X-rays, for five minutes, ten minutes, day after day; and when this doctor, for his important research, then collects your husband’s sperm using a prod of his own invention to insert in the rectum and stimulate ejaculation, so he can take away this radiated sperm to study under a microscope for science—then you die.”
Pinchas Goldschmidt smiled shyly.
No one spoke for a long time. Then Matthias said: “And after?”
“After?” Mrs. Goldschmidt shrugged. “The war ended. We went back to France, found Felix, went on. What else?”
“He was a wonderful boy,” said Mr. Goldschmidt.
“Yes,” said his wife. “And he made us happy. Didn’t he?”
“Very happy.”
“But then he grew up. And went away to university.”
“And we came here,” Mr. Goldschmidt said. “To America.”
“Because we despised France,” said his wife. “For what it let them do to us. Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité.”
Matthias pushed away from the door, returned to the couch. “I think you said Felix taught Jewish history.”
“He taught all kinds of history,” Mrs. Goldschmidt said. “He specialized in Jewish history.”
“And he became interested in von Trautschke.”
Mr. Goldschmidt looked at her over his shoulder. “This is a smart man, Hilda.” His wife made no reply. The old man leaned forward in his wheelchair. “He became interested in von Trautschke, sir. Intellectually.” Behind him, Mrs. Goldschmidt shook her head. The old man must have been aware of it because he added, “Maybe not just intellectually. But intellectually was part of it. He wanted to know how a man who invented the first fertility drug, who started as someone who appeared to be helping people, could finish as someone doing experiments on Block Ten.”
“It was all part of eugenics,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt. “Positive and negative.”
“Yes,” said her husband. He held out his hands. Mrs. Goldschmidt laid the manuscript in them. He leafed through it, stopped. “I translate—‘Positive eugenics. Encouraging the propagation of desirable elements. Negative eugenics. Discouraging the propagation of undesirable elements.’ Do you see Felix’s point? Positive and negative came together in the same man. They were part of the same thing. It was like Lebensborn. Von Trautschke was involved with that too.”
“Lebensborn?” said Nina.
The old man smiled at her. “She hasn’t heard of Lebensborn,” he said.
“Why are you smiling when she doesn’t know?” asked Mrs. Goldschmidt.
“It makes life better,” replied the old man. “Not knowing.” He turned to the second page of the manuscript, showed it to Nina. On it was an epigraph from Heinrich Himmler, in German.
“I can’t read that,” Nina said.
“No? Himmler was the head of Lebensborn, you see. Well of Life. The idea was to set up a chain of houses where unmarried girls impregnated by SS men could have their babies without stigma. They wanted to encourage the making of lots of eugenically positive babies.” He flipped through the manuscript. “‘In 1936, von Trautschke designed the questionnaire to establish the genetic heritage of the girls and women who wished to qualify for the Lebensborn program.’”
“But there was more to it than that,” Mrs. Goldschmidt said.
“I know, Hilda. I am explaining to her. The rest is in the epigraph.”
“What does it say?”
“Himmler,” replied Mr. Goldschmidt, “speaking to the officers of the Deutschland
Division, November 8, 1938. I translate—‘I really intend to take German blood from wherever it is to be found in the world, to rob it and steal it wherever I can.’”
Nina’s heart began to pound in her chest. “What does that mean?”
“Kidnapping, dear lady,” answered Mr. Goldschmidt. “When the Nazis occupied conquered territories, SS men fathered illegitimate children by local women. If Lebensborn established their racial purity, they were kidnapped and sent to Germany.”
“Oh God.”
“Yes, it was horrible,” Mr. Goldschmidt said. He reached over and patted her knee. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“And von Trautschke was involved with this?” Matthias said.
“He helped plan it,” Mr. Goldschmidt answered. “He wrote many learned papers for Himmler. He was an expert on fertility, you see. He even proposed artificial insemination of unmarried women, to expand the pool of—what does Felix call it?” He leafed through the manuscript, quickly found the place: “‘The biologically valuable.’ But that was too much for Himmler. He believed in the conventional family.”
Mrs. Goldschmidt snorted.
“Hilda.”
“What? Are you going to tell me there was some good even in Himmler?”
“No, Hilda. I will not tell you that.” She rubbed his shoulders.
“What happened to von Trautschke?” Matthias said.
Mr. Goldschmidt held up one of the Xerox document copies. “This,” he said, “is his death certificate. It states that he died in a traffic accident on April 2, 1945.”
“Just before the end of the war.”
“Exactly.”
Nina studied the death certificate. All she could read were two names: Wilhelm von Trautschke and Gerd Müller. She put her finger on “Müller.” “Why is he here?”
“Dr. Müller,” said Mr. Goldschmidt. “He signed the certificate. It has to be signed by a doctor.”
“Is this the same Müller who worked with von Trautschke?” Matthias asked.
Mr. Goldschmidt looked over his shoulder. “This is a smart man, Hilda.” He turned to Matthias. “Yes, Müller was on Block Ten too. He went to prison after the war.”
“For two years and three months,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt.
“But he went to prison, Hilda.”
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