Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

  His car, which actually was his brother’s again, was parked in the side street by the opera box office. He pulled a plastic bag from the hatchback and slung it over his shoulder, and we were off again. I let him steer me down Maximilianstraße, across the square that frames the opera and the Residenz (the in-town castle of the Bavarian kings when there still were kings), and then on into the pedestrian Maffeistraße. Here and there people emerged from restaurants, giggling, or stood about chatting, waiting for the streetcar. We passed the displays of the venerable specialty stores that used to supply the Bavarian royal household, offering the city’s widest selection of gloves, tobacco, tea and coffee, pralines, or lingerie.

  At some point I asked, “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He walked at a steady clip. Whatever was in that plastic bag jingled now and then. We rounded Munich’s signature clothing store, Lodenfrey, and entered the darker passageways that lead to the main cathedral, the Frauenkirche.

  Finally we found ourselves in front of the big church. A cobblestoned square sweeps around its main entrance, feathering into terraces to accommodate the slight rise in elevation from the street below. The Frauenkirche squats in the middle of the city like a mother hen. Its brick facade, two portly clock towers, and their verdigris bulb roofs make it not an imposing church but a homely one.

  The square was deserted. Harry made for one of the stone benches in front of the portal, gently set down his plastic bag, and bade me to have a seat. Just then, high above us in the night sky, the church bells began to clang: first four short dings to announce the full hour, then the big bangs—dong, dong, dong—counting toward midnight. From the bag, Harry produced a bottle of champagne and two flute glasses. At the dong of twelve, the champagne popped open and foamed over as he poured it into the glasses arranged on the bench.

  “I wish you,” he said, standing over me, handing me a glass, “a very happy birthday.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. We clinked our champagne glasses together, and then he pulled a little gift from the bag, wrapped in purple with a white ribbon.

  I did not open the little purple gift, a book that was also purple, until later. It was Joseph Roth’s Confession of a Murderer, one of those dense tales of human treachery for which I had a liking at the time. I read it right away, something I usually don’t do, and I ascribed meaning to the fact that the protagonist was infatuated with a woman named Annette. When I later told Harry about the cleverness of giving me that book, he confessed that the owner of Munich’s unique Jewish bookstore had recommended it. He had had no idea what it was about.

  That night I sat on the stone bench at the foot of the cathedral while Harry refilled my glass. With the champagne’s bubbles I became bubbly, laughed and chatted, about what I can’t remember, while he stood by, benevolently, slightly amused by his success.

  We left when the champagne bottle was empty and I quite tipsy. Harry had sipped only half a glass. My arm in his, we strolled back to his car through the night streets, I carrying my books and he the clinking bottle and glasses. We stopped in front of shop windows to comment on the fashion displays and detoured to my favorite shoe store to marvel at the suede sandals I was coveting. With this guy, I thought, one could go window shopping. One could have conversations about shoes, tops, and pants, how they go together, and whether linen is meant to be ironed or crumpled, and he wasn’t bored.

  He drove me home, of course. A friend had invited me for a birthday brunch the next day. I was still bubbly, full of glee, as I told her about that first date the night before. The thoughtfulness, the orchestration, the patience—I was impressed.

  SHOLEM ALEICHEM

  AFTER THAT FIRST DATE HARRY AND I TALKED ON THE phone almost every day. Late in the evening, I would lie in bed and we would get into long discussions about politics, the newspapers we read, the movies we had seen, the music we listened to, or more philosophical subjects, like the difference between men and women. Not only did we share a lot of interests, we also shared a certain sense of not belonging: he had been raised in Munich, but he was not German, nor would he ever be allowed, or allow himself, to identify with the “land of the murderers” (my wording). His mother was French; as a child she had been hidden in the French countryside during the war. He was born in Paris and carried a French passport because his parents did not want him to have a German one, even though he had lived in Germany his whole life. Unlike me, he had no German blood. His father was from the Russian–Polish border area and had remained stateless after the war. I, as Harry learned on our very first meeting, was half-American, and the German side of my family came from Czechoslovakia. My father had been too young to fight for the Wehrmacht, and my German grandfather had been too old.

  The first time I called Harry, I got his answering machine. “Sholem aleichem,” it announced. “You’ve reached the number . . .”

  Sholem aleichem? I had never heard that Yiddish greeting before, and so I thought this was his last name. In Germany people customarily answered the phone with their last name, a rather unpronounceable one, in this case. In due time I learned that sholem aleichem means “peace be upon you,” with the “you” in plural. The plural is used even when addressing one person be-cause one person is seen as a multitude of at least one body and one soul. I liked that idea: one person is a multitude. Since my father’s death, I had become keenly aware that one person’s life connects with so many others, and one person’s death takes away not only one life but a whole world.

  I didn’t see Harry again until more than two weeks later, when he and his brother threw a big party, packing their parents off to a hotel and opening the house and garden to everyone they knew. The brothers were not close, nor did they get along well, but for a few years they were known for throwing these parties—parties that distinguished themselves not by great food, decorations, or entertainment but by generosity. Everyone was welcome; food and drinks were abundant. At least one hundred guests would cram into their house and spill out onto the terrace and garden. Anyone who was anyone in the Jewish community of their generation was there, and all the non-Jews who were friends with anyone Jewish were there. Those parties knitted, unraveled, and reknitted the fabric of their circle of society, which, given that the Jewish community of Munich back then amounted to about four thousand people, included just about everybody. For months afterward, the party would serve as a reference point of new acquaintances made, old ones reaffirmed, girl- or boyfriends introduced, former affairs of the heart ignored.

  Harry had mentioned to me that he was throwing a party on June 15 and that it would be nice if I could come. So I came. His parents’ house on Kreillerstraße, on the eastern outskirts of the city, was set back from the street. A recording studio in a flat white building and a parking lot occupied the front part of the property. At the lot’s back, a sign on a garden gate read BEWARE OF THE DOG. It was an unassuming two-story house with muddy brown walls and dark red shutters. The windows were flung open, the front door stood ajar, and as I approached I could hear people’s laughter and the beginning beat of Alan Parsons’s Eye in the Sky. No one would have heard my ringing the bell, so I let myself in. Inside the house, a narrow hallway was packed with people, as were the two adjoining rooms.

  I had come fashionably late, so the party was at full roar. Silhouettes of heads moved in the half-dark, blue smoke gathering above them. The music thumped, and anyone who was trying to talk was yelling. I located Harry’s brother first. I immediately recognized him because he was so obviously Harry’s brother in looks, although taller and wider. He took up one of the doorways, where he sat playing disc jockey. I placed a hand on his damp shoulder to get his attention, and as he cocked his head I shouted, “Hi, you must be Harry’s brother. I’m Annette, a friend of Harry’s. Do you know where he is?”

  He hollered back, “Welcome. He’s over there somewhere,” and nodded in the direction of the passageway between the room he was facing and the next.

&nb
sp; I pushed my way between bodies, obtained a drink somewhere, but couldn’t find Harry. I finally located Michael’s familiar face among the heaving crowd. He wore his usual sour expression and looked particularly thin in the mass of swaying bodies. I chatted with him, and even though I spotted Harry, he was always in a knot of beautiful girls or cool guys and paid no attention to me.

  I started wondering why I was there. I wasn’t a big partygoer, preferring one-on-one conversations to small talk and milling about. If I did go to a party, I often spent the entire time in conversation with a kindred soul.

  Not at this one. I eventually lost Michael or he lost me. I hated standing around without a purpose, so I returned to stand behind Harry’s brother, who was still deejaying in the doorway. There, at least it was comfortable. I could pretend to enjoy the music by swaying and looking like I was listening.

  I must have stood there for some time, by myself but in the crowd, surveying the dancers, when a hand stole into mine. Harry appeared next to me. He didn’t say anything but stared into the room of dancers with me. He didn’t squeeze my hand as if to convey a message of mutual understanding; he just held it as if it were his to hold. We stood like that, side by side, for a minute or two, or maybe only a few seconds, until a cluster of friends accosted him with some kind of errand. He held my hand in his and pulled me along. I followed him around, content to be led, to have a spot to be. He politely introduced me to whomever he was talking to, but I don’t remember being engaged in any conversation that evening. I trailed along for some time until I got tired of that and found Michael, who took me home.

  My recollection of that party is not one of conversation or interaction, but of connection. A silent film of crowded rooms and smoky air, and of a hand holding mine.

  MEA CULPA

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, HARRY AND I DATED. We were always out and about, as I was still living at home and he was sharing an apartment with a punk and didn’t want me to see its pink walls or, worse, use its grimy bathroom.

  He would drive me home, and we would sit in the car in the parking lot next to my parents’ house. We would keep talking, sometimes for more than an hour. He would smoke with the driver’s window rolled down, or the sunroof open, to let the smoke escape. He would prop up his left foot on the little ledge that protruded between the driver’s door and the steering wheel shaft. He usually wore those moccasins, and the white of his socks gleamed in the light of the street lamp.

  It was the ideal setup for a tender interlude, but I wasn’t ready for that and bowed out of his attempts at getting a kiss. I realized that we were heading toward something deeper than friendship, that his interest in me was unavoidable. But I still had that other guy from Stuttgart gallivanting through my mind, a crush I had not given up on yet. One night I told Harry about him. For some reason, we got out of the car for this talk and walked around my village neighborhood, along the quiet streets seamed by hedges or low-rise walls, up and down the hill that led to my old elementary school. I told him that the previous summer I had met this guy, the friend of a friend in Stuttgart, with whom I had kept up a correspondence. There was something there that I needed to figure out. After a hiatus in writing, that guy had invited me to his twenty-fifth birthday party on Lake Constance, and I was going to go to see what was up.

  That guy hadn’t bothered to write in months, not even a condolence in response to the announcement of my father’s sudden death. Then this invitation arrived, with a letter beginning “mea culpa” that launched into a discourse of how tragic it was for my mother to have lost her husband at age forty-eight, but not a word about the impromptu two-hour train trip I had taken months before to pay him a visit. But his letters, once he did write them; his handwriting, with the letters leaning to the right, the g’s and h’s looping high and low; his audacity in starting a letter with “mea culpa”—all that still charmed me.

  I felt I had to venture out and take another trip for him, this time at his invitation, to attend his birthday party at a lakeside estate. I had to tell Harry about this trip and this “rival.” I already told Harry pretty much everything. We walked along the silent streets and kept walking even when it started to rain. Harry ruined his cream-colored trench coat that night, while I was trying to explain that I wasn’t really into him. The coat wasn’t waterproof, and the sweater he was wearing got soaked, its dark blue dye bleeding into the white of the coat.

  Harry stood in the rain, a few feet from me, hands in his pockets, defeated by my story and defiant at the same time.

  “So you’re telling me you have to go see this guy,” he said.

  “I do,” I said.

  We parted, both of us not sure why we had come to this impasse, I conscious that I might have stretched the bond between us too far but still having to hurt him, hurt myself, in order to settle one chapter before maybe being able to embrace another; he conscious of the preciousness of our bond and yet unsure whether it was defendable.

  I traveled to that party on Lake Constance, taking this and that train, since it wasn’t the easiest place to reach and I didn’t drive yet. But when I got there, Mea Culpa was not eagerly awaiting my arrival, and I had to hang out with our mutual friend until I finally found him in a dim corner, smooching some girl he didn’t even introduce me to. I was too embarrassed to call him on that. After all, I had no claim on him, had I? It had been a stupid girlie crush.

  I was merely one guest in a crowd. I milled about, put on a nonchalant face, chatted with mutual friends when they bothered, and tried to concentrate on the midnight fireworks exploding over the water, oohing and aahing with everybody else. I had arranged for my brother and his girlfriend to pick me up after the fireworks, as they were driving home from some trip and were sort of passing by. I spent the entire two-hour ride crying into their backseat, wondering why my brother had a girlfriend but I couldn’t manage to have a boyfriend.

  I must have sensed already then, when the presence of both men in my life coincided, one in the flesh, the other in a letter, who the stronger force would be, who would have to be reckoned with, or the thought but surely I cannot marry a Jew would not have crossed my mind upon first meeting Harry. But the premonition of a momentous course correction was too much to deal with right away. Mea Culpa provided a welcome detour and, in the end, the ultimate confirmation that Harry was the one.

  HEADING OFF

  I WAS DYING TO TELL HARRY ABOUT MY FAILED TRIP, not to encourage him but to unburden myself the way one unloads to a best friend. But I didn’t do that. I did not pick up the phone. I was too proud.

  A week later Harry did call, and I told him everything, immediately, in more detail than I would have expected. To this day, now and then, he’ll say, “So what would have happened if I hadn’t called?”

  “Nothing would have happened,” I’ll reply.

  “You wouldn’t have called, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you’d be married in Stuttgart now, living in a row house, driving a Porsche.”

  At which point I’ll get irritated and reply that no, I would not have married that guy, even if he had still been interested, which clearly he wasn’t, but Harry ignores that detail. Surely I would have gotten bored with him, because most guys bored me once the infatuation wore off.

  With Mea Culpa behind us, Harry and I were free to flirt. Or, rather, I was free to flirt. Free to anticipate our encounters. That summer semester I was taking classes at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut for Political Science in Munich, located in a stately building on Ludwigstraße. I loved that the institute was accessible only through a courtyard lined with antique shops and you therefore traversed a world utterly unrelated to student life and lofty political theories before climbing the gray staircase to the even-grayer classrooms.

  One stuffy summer evening, I packed up my books as class let out. I had just started taking classes in political science that semester, so I hadn’t made any friends yet. As I shouldered my bag, I had the distinct premonition th
at Harry would pick me up, even though we had arranged nothing of the sort.

  This was the time before cell phones, so dates could not be set up on the spur of the moment. If you wanted to see someone without prior arrangement, you had to know where he would be at what time, and you would have to head him off.

  I took my time walking down the stairs, half expecting to see Harry waiting in the courtyard, drawing on a cigarette, in his polo shirt and slacks, his tad of a belly above the belt, his dark, curly head slightly tilted. But the courtyard was empty. I waited around a bit, then walked into the passageway by the antique shop and studied the still lifes on display. All the while, I eyed the other end of the courtyard. Classes were done for the day, and the store had closed already, so hardly anyone had reason to walk by. The day’s heat had pooled in the courtyard, and eventually sweat was trickling down my chest, so I wandered down the little side street and out onto the wide and breezy sidewalk of Ludwigstraße.

  No Harry in sight there, either, just pedestrians and traffic passing by. From there I could not observe both entrances to the courtyard and risked not seeing him should he enter one while I watched the other. So I walked up and down the expanse of the institute’s street front to check on one entrance, then back to check the other. After a few minutes I circled back to the courtyard, which was still empty. I tried to look like I had some purpose, inspecting the shop windows or pacing the sidewalk as if I were going somewhere. I felt ridiculous waiting around like that, but I was also quite sure of what I was doing. I hoped, each time I rounded the corner of the building onto the wide sidewalk, that I would bump into Harry. It would look like I had just left the building and was hurrying to the subway.