Why give any further explanation? Amanda kept silent and quickened her step. Alongside her, he scrutinized her features—the size of her ears, her nose, as though he was an expert in craniometry. If he had with him an instrument to study the facial characteristics that differentiate mortals from immortals, he would have measured her forehead, the distance between her eyes, how far the base of her nose was from her top lip.
The official, shielded behind an enormous mahogany desk that was strewn with lists in immaculate handwriting, organized by alphabetical order and date of arrest, listened to the name Amanda gave in a firm voice and went down the list one by one.
Amanda’s heart was pounding. She didn’t want to show she was afraid, for the official would be able to sniff it and she’d lose control. She couldn’t allow herself to do that. Instead, she counted in silence. One, two, three, four, five, six—
“Sternberg. Sternberg, Julius. So you are the doctor’s wife. Frau Sternberg, your husband is no longer in this building. He wounded himself on a piece of glass in his office. He made himself a tourniquet on his leg. We can’t keep anyone wounded here.”
The toy soldier was still standing behind her.
“Which hospital was he transferred to?”
“Frau Sternberg, your husband didn’t go to a hospital. The wound will heal. Your husband is in Sachsenhausen.”
At first she didn’t understand, but repeated the name several times in her head until she recalled what she had heard about it: A forced labor camp on the outskirts of Berlin. No one came back from Sachsenhausen.
“But isn’t that where they send gypsies, communists, people involved in politics? My husband is a cardiologist. A medical doctor.”
“Frau Sternberg, there’s no mistake. Your husband has been sent to Sachsenhausen with all the others of his kind,” the official said, emphasizing the “of his kind’ so there could be no doubt. “They need doctors in Sachsenhausen too. Wait, be patient, and he’ll write to you.”
These last words pierced her like an arrow. On her way out, she descended the stairs with the gait of a wounded horse about to be put down. She lost all sense of time and space, and it was only when she was out in the street again that the shouts of the helpless women roused her from her stupor.
An old woman held out a scrap of crumpled paper to her. Two names were written on it. Her sons, she sobbed. But Amanda could no longer listen, hear, or see. Bewildered, she made her way through this crowd of phantoms. As she walked away, she could see the evening sky turn purple at the far end of a directionless avenue.
Crossing beneath the railway line, she noticed an elegant, elderly man coming toward her wearing a hat and tie and using a cane. He was walking with a long-acquired dignity, repeating over and over a phrase Amanda only understood when she almost bumped into him: “They took them all away. They took them all away.”
She realized that this was the echo of loss: her loss, the old man’s, that of the women in Grosse Hamburger Strasse tearing themselves to pieces as they wept, fearing that their loved ones who had been taken away would never return.
6
The next morning, Amanda went to the abandoned practice to see whether it was true that Julius had wounded himself on one of the shards of glass from the front door. There were traces of blood everywhere, but there were also obvious signs of a struggle. Her husband had fought for his life, fought to escape, not to let himself be defeated. Amanda sat on the sofa as she used to do on those sunny afternoons that were already slipping from her memory. She remained for a while staring at the door with the somber hope for a miracle, but she didn’t believe in miracles.
She tried to recall the last time she had seen him, the last words, the last embrace, the last kiss. Nothing. She couldn’t even remember Julius’s tone of voice when he said goodbye to her every morning. She had wiped away all those happy moments, and now was face-to-face with the dried, lifeless blood of the only man she had ever loved.
Hilde decided to move in with them until Julius was released. Lina studied their faces closely; her solemn look seemed to express the conviction that her father would never return. Amanda smiled at her and prepared herself to receive the fateful news her daughter seemed able to predict. She sensed that, with Lina at her side, the future would never come as a surprise.
Three weeks later, Julius’s letter arrived. With no indication of where it had come from, only her name on it. Amanda stood in the doorway to the bookstore, letter in hand. At first she was disconcerted, because it appeared to be full of instructions. She didn’t recognize the shaky, scrawled handwriting with some incomplete words. That yellowing, stained, and crumpled piece of paper was the last thing her husband had touched.
December 2, 1938
Amanda:
You are to go to police headquarters in Alexanderplatz. In reception ask for Herr Christmann and identify yourself. From there go to the Office for Palestine at number ten Meinekestrasse and ask for Mr. Donovan. Register as the doctor’s wife, you won’t have to tell him anything apart from that.
The suitcases are on the only shelf with doors in the back room.
I can’t control the infection in my leg. It keeps spreading, and here, as you can imagine, there are no medicines. I can no longer walk, but I have at least one piece of good news: it doesn’t hurt.
How are my little girls? Tell Viera she should always look after her sister. All three of you, remember that fear leads nowhere. Fear only ends up taking away what little lucidity we have left. Count every heartbeat; you can be sure that from here I will count with you all.
What would my life have been if I hadn’t met you? You came to me when I most needed you. You are my light. Once in Leipzig we had a dream together. We imagined getting married, starting a family, opening a practice, and for you to reopen your father’s old, abandoned bookstore. We would have two, perhaps three children. We would spend summers at Wannsee and one day climb the Acropolis together. We have achieved our most important dreams. Now help me build the finale for us.
From this dark, cold place I can hear your heart. I know from memory all its movements. When you are asleep or awake, happy or sad, like today.
My Amanda, I want you never to forget that we were happy once.
Your Julius
When she finished reading his words, Amanda realized this was her husband’s farewell. She allowed a cry to emerge from deep down inside her, and collapsed onto the sidewalk, in full view of everyone. Yes, she wanted them to see her weep, to see what they had done to her family. She wanted each and every one of the perfect race to recognize the horror and feel the guilt they would have to bear and one day, yes, one day in the not too distant future, would have to pay for.
Leaving the girls with Hilde, she wandered wild-eyed and coatless across the city, as if it would take only seconds from her home to Alexanderplatz. She didn’t feel the cold. She clutched her stiff brown leather bag to her. She had slipped Julius’s letter in it, and other than that it was almost empty, with only a few banknotes and coins inside, as well as the last photo of the four of them together, when Lina was born. A family with solemn eyes, even though the photographer insisted on an impossible smile. A dark photo, where the only light was in their faces; the rest of the image was blurred, out of focus. Remembering that she had it with her gave Amanda a tenuous sense of happiness, a fleeting emotion that was already foreign to her but which she could recognize and smile at.
It was a weekday—she didn’t know which, but that didn’t matter. She took the first train and was jostled by the passersby, swept along like an already lifeless body. She made her way down impeccably clean streets where there was no broken glass, no charred remains, no traces of the horror. Who were the phantoms? Them or her? She couldn’t work it out.
She entered the police headquarters without anyone seeming to notice or care; she felt like she was already dead. She followed Julius’s instructions and was given an envelope that she put unopened in her stiff handbag. She was trembling
, but not from fear. She was sure of that, because her heart had stopped the moment she received the message from Julius. Where had she left his letter? There it was, in her hand.
She again got on and off a train; traveled from Mitte to Charlottenburg without being aware of it. Now she was outside the building bearing the huge sign PALESTINE & ORIENT LLOYD. There were no long lines of desperate people, now there was nobody. Everyone had left. The windows were smashed, the offices abandoned, a single curious onlooker lurked in the entrance.
She continued walking distractedly. She had no idea where to go now, because the letter did not say what she should do if the Office for Palestine was shut or if Mr. Donovan had gone, been arrested, or killed. Searching for somewhere she knew, she walked on to Olivaer Platz: the windowpanes of Georg’s café were also smashed, the door torn off its hinges, the tables and chairs overturned. It seemed there were no places she knew left in Berlin.
She found herself beneath an illuminated marquee and a few minutes later, inside the building, engulfed in the choking smoke from the cigarettes of souls lost to the shadows. To her and Julius there had been nothing more mysterious or awe-inspiring than to sit in this sacred arena invaded by luminous ghosts on the enormous screen where even the darkest corners came to life in black and white. Among the credits she saw the name of a childhood friend she used to call by her first name, Helene. They had both gone to classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School, at a time when she dreamed of becoming a dancer and Helene an actress. They went swimming together and competed until they were panting for breath.
Now, led on the screen by Helene, she allowed herself to be taken through the countless columns of Greek temples, then she rises to the skies, where a goddess of Olympia opens her arms to her. She sees perspiring faces, ready to compete and shouting at the tops of their voices, as if they have been thrown to hungry lions in the arena. Someone must always win: this is the hour of victory, the moment for flight, when the fastest man in the world strides out and wins, to the dismay of the perfect race. If he can do it, so can she. If he surpasses human limits, nothing will stop her.
The masses howl, thirsty for blood, shouting for the downfall of the other. She is the other. The Olympic flame is about to be extinguished when someone launches a discus to the most distant clouds and the faces blur in a salute to the void. The men smoking in the orchestra, soldiers in an invisible army, stand when they see the man controlling their destinies appear on the screen. They respond as one to an impulse, a force outside them, and raise their right arm to the infinite . . .
One of the soldiers in front of her rebukes her:
“How can a perfect German woman stay seated, and not respond to the triumph of the superior race?” he says, trying to encourage her with a triumphal gesture.
I wonder if Helene remembers what we dreamed? thinks Amanda, ignoring the man. Helene has become a star in the service of Nazi power.
When Amanda closes her eyes, the dark auditorium vanishes. Now she is dreaming with Julius at her side, as on those evenings when they used to lose themselves in the Palast, smiling at men in white ties and tails and shiny pumps as they danced down marble stairs by the light of a silver moon and crystal stars, and she followed their rhythm in the silk gown molded to her as if it were an extension of her ethereal body.
A man whistling makes her shiver in the dense fog of the forgotten. She huddles in Julius’s arms, asking, Why do you bring me here? but he only smiles.
She is still shivering at the whistling that terrifies her whenever it fills the auditorium, before the man with the anguished face reappears out of the shadows. A chorus of girls sing a song about a murderer: In the hall of the mountain king . . .
Amanda closes her eyes again and tries to forget that image on the screen at the Palast.
Why remember Julius through a movie that makes me shudder? she wonders. Bewildered, she sees the story being repeated and knows she must flee. Her daughters are at the mercy of a serial killer hidden behind the victors’ spotless uniforms.
Leaving the cinema, she opens her bag to retrieve Julius’s letter. All she reads is the date, which she repeats to herself.
December 2, 1938. Was that a Saturday?
7
While Amanda was searching for a way to escape from the city, Viera and Lina amused themselves by playing with their father’s old stethoscope, listening through walls and windows. To Lina, every inanimate object was alive, and she was there to demonstrate it. Before raising a piece of fruit to her mouth, she examined it to see whether it was breathing or not. Every night, before her mother read to her in French from the botanical album, she would listen for its heartbeat, and wouldn’t allow Amanda to open it to the page they had reached the night before until she said she had detected it. Viera would smell the faded pages and sigh.
From having been read to so much in French, Lina could recite whole paragraphs from the book fluently. When they went out with Hilde on the way to a café or a park, they spoke in the language that Amanda herself had learned from her father as a child.
Every so often, Amanda would wander among the empty bookshelves of the old store with Lina at her tail, recalling where the novels of chivalry and romance used to be, the first editions, French translations, botanical books, atlases, and popular encyclopedias, dictionaries. With her eyes shut, she could recall exactly where Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, or Les Misérables had once been. In her dreams she sometimes imagined that one of her literary treasures, that had been a favorite of hers or her father’s, would return as if by magic and surprise her.
Hilde entertained the girls by pulling out of the wardrobe silk dresses that were no longer worn, shawls embroidered with gold thread, or fans made with Bruges lace. She would put lipstick on their mouths, cheeks, and the tips of their noses, and use her eyebrow pencil to create beauty spots in their dimples. They roared with laughter as though they were happy, as though Julius had never left and still put them to sleep on hot nights.
“Mama is sad,” Lina said one day, and the happy moment was gone in an instant. “I know Papa is never coming back.”
Leaning back in her armchair, Hilde invented stories to shield them as best she could.
“One day when you’re least expecting it, that door will open to let the doctor in. Herr Sternberg is going to come back, and do you know why? Because if he is capable of saving someone with a weak heart, the most important organ in the body, he must know how to recover from any wound, however serious. He will get better and return to you. Let’s see, what would you like to do tomorrow afternoon?”
The girls did not respond. They preferred not to go out, feeling protected in the apartment above what had once been a bookstore, far from the street and neighbors who did not like them.
One afternoon, when they were singing an old lullaby that Lina insisted on even though it wasn’t bedtime, they were startled by a thunderous knocking on the street door. Hilde went down, determined to find out who was trying to invade their precious home; Amanda followed her. The first thing she saw was the swastika in the man’s lapel; then she recognized the face of the patient she had exchanged a few words with in her husband’s office. She had an even more vivid memory of his skinny son, the boy with the purple lips. She asked Hilde to go upstairs to the girls, and, refusing to greet her enemy, waited for him to come out with another insult like the one she had received when they met the first time.
“Frau Sternberg, I’ve brought a message from your husband. May I come in?” he said, glancing all around as if to make sure no one had seen him enter this building marked with the sign of shame.
Amanda stepped aside. The stocky man was still looking around nervously. He did not know how to begin or how to explain himself. Without saying anything he took a bulky envelope out of his raincoat pocket and held it out to her.
Amanda couldn’t understand what he was doing there, if he had come to pay a debt that with the new racial laws would not be valid anyway, or if these documents wer
e announcing that she was to be arrested as well.
She confronted the man with her most defiant look.
“What do you want from us?” she snapped, ignoring the envelope.
“I’ve come to help,” the man said hesitantly.
“We don’t need your help. You know very well that my husband will be back any time now.”
“Frau Sternberg, I’m afraid to say that your husband will not be coming back.”
They stood in silence for a few moments, until the composure that Amanda had carefully maintained since his arrival began to dissolve. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she made a huge effort for them not to roll down her cheeks.
The man still had his hand extended, as if to insist that this stubborn woman should trust him despite the distance between them as far as race and even more importantly, ideology, were concerned. He was a militant of the party in power; she was a Jewish woman with the looks of a German.
“It’s the least I can do for your husband. Please take it.”
“I don’t need your money,” Amanda told him.
“My son is alive thanks to your husband,” the man insisted.
“And how is your son?” she asked, her voice growing ever fainter. She couldn’t meet his gaze anymore without bursting into tears.
“He won’t be able to serve the Führer, but at least he is with us,” the man replied with a smile he immediately stifled, unsure if he had said the wrong thing.
Amanda took the envelope. She was about to check what was in it when the man interrupted her.
“You already have your passports. I know you couldn’t get visas for Palestine, but I managed to obtain permits to disembark in Cuba. They’re first-class tickets on a German ocean liner. The tickets are in the envelope. I made sure everything is in order. With your husband’s help I was able to locate your brother in Havana, and he has sent word that he is willing to receive all of you.”
“We’re not leaving without my husband,” Amanda protested, realizing at that moment that Julius had been plotting his family’s escape for weeks, if not months.
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