by Jay Cantor
Had it been a compensation or comfort to her that she’d noticed the crows? Inge had surely been right that the details were not angels, answered no prayers, and wouldn’t survive the general destruction; and yet she hadn’t been able to take her eyes from the black birds until they settled back on the roof.
By May of 1944, the executions were almost continual, the corpses carted immediately to the new crematoria along with the hundreds of others who’d died each week from cold, and typhus, or starvation. The insignificant rations had been cut in half, the workday extended to eleven hours, and anyone who looked like they might not be able to labor hard—anyone too thin, or who had swollen legs or gray hair—was murdered and burnt. On her way to the infirmary today, she saw a few SS men lash some of the condemned forward across the space where there had once been a promenade, and the wraithlike prisoners’ expressions and pace remained unchanged as they moved steadily to their end.
12
THEY PASSED. Eva climbed through the broken window at the back of the infirmary, into the latrine, and walked past the corpses stacked against the wall by the toilets. Any prisoner who came with a fever was told to rest in the hall till a bed was available, and during the night was given an injection of Evipan. The bodies mounted up and had to wait here for a week to be carted off to the fire.
In the corridor, Eva picked her way over those soon to be murdered, and went on to Milena’s ward. Her friends already stood around her bed. Several of them had used a paste of water and soot to disguise their gray hair, in the hope they’d be able to avoid the ovens. Why would these frightened women care so much about Milena that they would risk being found away from their work, in order to make sure she wouldn’t be given a lethal injection, even though her kidneys would certainly soon kill her. Had she stroked their breasts, too? Had she led them, too, back to a world that would become insupportable to them without her?
Milena gestured to Eva, who came forward and leaned toward her mouth, and Eva felt proud that the others were seeing her special place in Milena’s heart. Milena told her to look after Jana when she died, tell her daughter that Milena had always kept her in her heart, and that she’d spoken of her every day in the camp.
Perhaps Milena thought that was true. Eva nodded yes, though it was foolish to think that she would live very much longer herself. Or would want to.
“And promise me you won’t forget any of the details for our book.”
“No,” she said. “Of course I won’t.” Though once Milena was not there to make them supportable she would, she knew, pray that she might.
After that, Milena asked Eva to hold up some postcards her father sent with engravings of Prague scenes, so her homeland would be the last thing she saw. Milena stared at one and talked as if she and Eva were inside the picture, walking by the cathedral, the two of them and one other, a man who Eva thought must be Kafka. Milena said, “I want to pray.” She sounded as if she were pleading for the chance.
“You should,” Eva said. “I’ll join you.”
“No, I can’t. You know he won’t tolerate lies.”
Milena cried—or so her eyes looked; she didn’t have enough water for tears. Eva touched her withered cheek, but she could see Milena didn’t see or feel her hand.
“He withholds himself,” Milena said.
“Kafka, you mean? Or God?”
“Oh, both of them.” Milena smiled with teeth that were almost completely brown, and died.
13
AT THE END OF 1944, about six months after Milena had died, a gas chamber had been built to destroy the Jews brought in from the death camps in the east that had been closed as the Soviets advanced toward Germany. The chamber’s brickwork had a yellow tone that was like the felt that had done nothing to keep her child from being taken from her, the color now collaborating with the Nazis in murder, and Eva had understood why Inge had gestured at the whole skin of the world. Everything seen only added to Eva’s nausea. She wanted to cry out, Why did you call me to sight again, if this is what one sees? But the person she wanted to cry to was dead.
For the next six months the Nazis fed the gas chamber night and day, and the smell of burning flesh pervaded the camp, growing stronger still as the Soviet Army approached Ravensbruck from the east. And then, in May of 1945, a year since Milena had died, most of the German prisoners were suddenly released, ordered to make their own way home.
14
EVA HAD GONE as fast as she could toward where she thought she’d find the American lines, and when she’d found them, she remembered that she’d stolen a bicycle, but not much more about the trip. With each kilometer from Ravensbruck, Eva had become more like what she’d been when she’d left the isolation cell in Karaganda, a woman moving in a world she could barely see. But she wasn’t just as she’d been after the isolation cell, either, for she still had Ravensbruck inside, because she’d shared that place with Milena; and she had, too, the things she’d talked about that had come alive from her interest. Each memory was now the source of a harrowing pain. And when, against her own good sense, she would search inside herself for the image of Milena to help her bear that pain, her mind and body again discovered her death, and she would double over in grief.
And that was her existence for a year. Once or twice, thinking to feel even a flare of the present, she’d burnt her hand, or cut her arm with a knife, but that only scarred her body and stained her clothes. Eventually, someone gave her the name of a psychiatrist in Heidelberg who was not strictly Freudian—the Nazis had made sure no doctor left alive in Germany was strictly Freudian—but he was a sort of psychoanalyst nonetheless, and her friend claimed he’d had some success treating the severe depressions of those who had been interned in the camps.
15
THREE MONTHS into the sessions, her doctor said, “Perhaps your Milena thrived on people needing her as you did, depending on her in an almost desperate way, like a baby with its mother.”
Eva saw Milena wave away the bread she’d offered her. I want always to be the one who cares for you. “And when she repeated the details of my life,” she said, “was that like a mother feeding her baby?” She thought she’d been joking—or as close as she might come to that activity.
“Yes, precisely so.” The doctor was a thin, fussy-looking man, who had a well-appointed neat office, which gave it an air of unreality, since there could be no such offices left in a shattered and occupied Germany. “Milena repeated the details, made them palatable to you by making them part of the maternal body, and then she nursed you with your own life. Each time, it bound you more tightly to her.”
Her doctor believed that Eva’s affection for Milena was why she still remained tied to a traumatic past (by which adjective he meant the way the German people, maybe including him, had conspired to murder whole nations, make her and thousands of others into slave-labor, and then had starved the slaves to death).
Like all love, he said, Eva’s for Milena was love for a fantasy, an illusion; it was a vast overvaluation. Eva needed to analyze it, and break her destructive attachment to Milena and to the trauma of which she’d been a part.
And hadn’t Milena, like the doctor, said that Eva made too much of her? She tried to see Milena clearly, as she supposed Kafka would have. She wanted to be healthy again, wanted one day to visit her daughter in Jerusalem, and not terrify the child by her soul’s absence.
But for all efforts, what she saw, when she remembered Milena’s gestures, wasn’t moral flaws, but the beauty of the way she’d swept her long hand outward, the thinness of her arm, the generosity of her smile, the reality of her care. And what Milena had done with Eva’s life seemed kind and intuitive, a method to take Eva’s poisoned past and make it into food for her again. Despite all the doctor’s mean-spirited interpretations, Eva’s love for Milena felt undiminished, and the present as distant as ever.
“Our time is up for today.”
Eva put on her coat.
“Have you written your daughter lately?�
�� He meant, she thought, Please try to take an interest in a future, so you might have a present again.
16
WITHIN AN HOUR, she sat at a small wood table in a furnished room, over a café that served U.S. officers scalding but real coffee that the café owner bought on the black market, along with stale black-market pastries. She couldn’t have told you if she’d taken off her coat yet, or what she’d thought or seen on her walk back to this room, except that, as always, the buildings, which had been left standing by the Allies during the War, had looked as insubstantial to her as the painted backdrop for a play; as if, in occupied Germany, only what was already destroyed could possibly have ever been real in the first place.
She looked down at the table and saw that she must have recently set a blank sheet of paper there, probably so she could, as the doctor wanted, reply to a child who had written page after page that was sympathetic to the situation of the unknown woman who called herself her mother, saddened by the horror she’d passed through, and horrified by the hatred she’d had to confront from those former comrades who had been her only friends. Her daughter didn’t reproach her with once having sacrificed her to those same comrades, but instead said in each letter how much she wanted her mother to come to Jerusalem as soon as she felt well enough—though all of it, the sympathy and the invitation, always felt written to measure, probably under the direction of her former husband, or her unfailingly polite father-in-law, the same theologian who’d paid for the court case against her.
That memory made her feel like a weight had been dropped on her back, and she bent toward the table. Once Milena had said, When you gave up your daughter, you also saved her life, but this evening that only increased her grief, because Milena wasn’t there anymore, and because in Jerusalem her daughter would know the truth: Eva hadn’t given her child up to save her; it was the court that had rescued her child when it seized her from Eva.
That child was now a young woman of nineteen. She’d enclosed a recent picture of herself, and Eva lay the photo against a pile of her letters. Her daughter stood smiling beside her father, and the resemblance was striking—both of them tall, beautiful creatures, with longish faces and sorrowful Jewish eyes. If the doctor managed to return Eva to the present, would she see a resemblance to herself, as well? Was a mother who had abandoned her child allowed to see that?
For comfort, she picked up an envelope from a second pile, this one addressed in a careless, rushing hand, the pages inside smudged and ripped from being too often read. It was just the sort of letter the writer’s mother had once said she wanted, pages desperate with need and confusion, and filled with details of the girl’s life. And her letters always had some details, too, that could be added to Eva’s store of memories of Milena, as if Eva’s life could now grow backward only, and, like some historian’s book, only through the reports about the past from others.
She’d learned from Jana that Milena—the scarecrow—had once been overweight. Milena couldn’t cook, and dinner was usually sausages on a plate. Milena wore a beret whenever she left the house but took it off as soon as any conversation began, and used it to gesture. Milena listened to the radio all night long, going from station to station, stopping even at those whose language she couldn’t understand. Milena loved movies, and always took Jana with her, no matter how adult the subject. Milena would walk through Prague with her afterward, the two of them warming their hands from one chestnut seller to the next, and Milena answered all Jana’s questions. Milena would make everything into a game, and when the electricity was cut off because they couldn’t pay the bill, she put candles in bottles and went from room to room playing the Miller and the Child.
The details in Jana’s letters were precious but didn’t bring Eva closer to the present and didn’t reduce the pain of the past, but only added to it, reminding her both how much of Milena’s life she’d been excluded from and that that life was over. Yet more pain was at least more; and listing what she’d learned about Milena this evening was bitter, but also tonic; it gave Eva the strength and the resolve to try to fulfill the doctor’s prescription to write her own daughter.
In the morning, though, she woke by the table, still in her coat, and the page still blank.
17
FOR WEEKS THAT SUMMER, almost every day brought alkaline yet sustaining words from Jana, who had begun to trust Eva more, and to speak more frankly about her life, and about her mother. The weight Jana had mentioned had come from Milena’s morphine addiction; Milena’s nervous fiddling with the radio was the anxiety of an addict who didn’t have her drugs; the games in the dark had been fun, but the reason they couldn’t pay the bill was because the money had gone to buy the precious cough tablets, which were kept in a tea set’s yellow milk jug that sat on a sideboard.
Mother didn’t suffer helplessly, though. She tried over and over to end the habit, and once had Evzen lock her in her room and keep the key. Within a few days, though, she waited till Evzen was out and shouted to me to get her more pills from the pharmacist, to do it within an hour, and to push them through the crack under the door, or she would jump out the window to her death. Can you imagine my fear in the taxi on the way to the pharmacy?
And, indeed, though Eva couldn’t have told you the color of her doctor’s hair, the yellow of that milk jug had a hallucinatory intensity for her, and though Eva could barely imagine the insides of the people near her, she could feel just as Jana had in the taxi, the anxiety vivid to her because it had been caused by love for Milena. And though she knew that what Milena had done was savage, it still didn’t diminish her love for her, any more than it had that of the girl who wrote her about it.
After, she opened the other envelope, one addressed in a hand she didn’t recognize.
18
“YESTERDAY,” she told the doctor, “I got an anonymous directive that very much agreed with you. It said I shouldn’t dwell on the past.”
“Yes? I’m glad to hear that. But why anonymous?”
“Lack of courage. It warned me not to write a book about the supposed Soviet camps, because if I slandered the party, it would have to broadcast the truth about my collaboration in Ravensbruck with the Gestapo.” She cared not much more about that lie than about anything else, but she wondered how they’d heard she might write such a book. “It had to be from someone in Ravensbruck with me.” She paused. “Or maybe it was you, doctor.”
The doctor laughed. “First of all, the threat is, I hope, a pointless one, because you could never be so depressive as to write a book that would only imprison you further in your own past. And when you level that ridiculous accusation against me,” he said, “you indicate why you bring this up in the first place. You’re looking for an excuse to run away from therapy.”
The doctor didn’t understand that it might be unhealthy for her to write the book, but that if the party found they could control her in this matter, there was no end to what they might demand from her.
Still, she dropped the matter and told the doctor instead about Jana’s letters, most recently about how Milena had used her in party work, sending her to collect their illegal newspaper, despite the risk to Jana.
“I regret your writing her daughter,” he said, “for the same reason I wouldn’t want you to write that book. But perhaps there’s something to be learned here. Milena never seemed to think about the consequences of her actions for Jana, or for you. Probably there was always something more important to her, her journalism, her Communist Party, her underground work, her drugs. But really, wasn’t the real cause that everyone was meant to make sacrifices for Milena herself, and her own lust for experience?”
Eva felt a sharp pain in her stomach; a wayward desire to please this fussy man had made her betray her beloved. Still, what he had just said might well be true.
“I remember we talked of Milena as like your mother. Jana’s letters might make you wonder if she was a good one for her own child, or for you.”
And yet what Eva thought was
that she, herself, would have been just such a mother to her own daughter, if the court had given her the chance. She’d have told herself that there was no sacrifice that one mustn’t make for the worker’s cause and the defeat of fascism, and used her to carry messages, perhaps, or to pick up papers. And when she’d fled Germany, she’d have taken her daughter with her to the Soviet Union, where, when Eva had been arrested, her daughter would have disappeared into a Soviet orphanage and died. Her husband’s court case had saved her daughter from the Nazis, and from the child’s own heedless, fanatical, and deadly mother.
This identity meant that for the first time since she’d begun talking to this doctor, Eva felt a disappointment in Milena that was as strong as her disappointment in herself, but when she looked about the doctor’s office, it was no more present to her than before.
“For today,” the doctor said, “our time is up.”
19
THE NEXT WEEK, Eva began to talk about Jana’s own dabbling with morphine herself.
The doctor interrupted her and asked angrily why she’d written to Jana again after he’d specifically ordered her not to do that.
She would have sworn that he sounded frightened.