The Lost Family

by Jenna Blum

  Peter cursed. He knocked the metal cylinder against his palm, trying to jar the beam back on, but nothing happened. Peter navigated his way from the bathroom by touch, amazed as always by how walls, corners, doorways seemed to move once you couldn’t see them. It was a lesson forgotten until now but familiar, learned during air raids, in basements, on U-Bahn platforms, in closets, and, of course, in the bunks. The smell of strangers’ wool coats, unwashed hair, bodily secretions, breath—hunger in particular created a dead-mouse odor. The shuffling that might be feet, limbs shifting in very little space, or vermin. The unidentified movement inches from one’s face. At least in the aboveground shelters there was usually some ambient light, a precious match lit to check a watch or tend a sick child, the outline of a night sky around a windowshade. But here in the hallway at Masha’s, the lack of light reminded Peter of subterranean hideouts, of his narrow bed slot in Block 14 when the SS ordered the camp blacked out due to bombing raids. The dark in those cases assumed an unpleasant solidity, a gelid quality that made it impossible for Peter to see his palm when he touched his nose with it—assuming he was able to lift his arm from among the four other men to do so.

  Peter sighed and felt along the hallway wall until he reached the dining room, where he groped for and lit a candle. He was drenched with perspiration beneath his chef’s whites, his body crawling with it, a sensation he hated. He felt impatient with himself. It was all very well, even understandable, that the blackout had caused him to remember things he’d worked so hard to forget. That was how the body ticked, perhaps. But he had to exercise more control over his mind. He would not, could not, go back to the insanity he’d lived through right after he’d come to this country, when apropos of nothing—he could be applying butter to toast, petting a dog, walking through a park—time would suddenly seesaw and slide him back into Auschwitz. Or Theresienstadt. Or Berlin. He would not do it. He would not indulge these memories. “I refuse,” said Peter to the dark.

  As if in answer, there was a sound from back in the hallway, like the mewl of a cat. “Hello?” Peter called. The noise came again—myooou?—sounding as though it were coming from the ladies’ room, which, Peter remembered now, he hadn’t yet checked. It probably was a stray—he hoped. Sometimes the patrons or staff opened the window as far as it would go, three inches, and God knew what could have come in through the bars. Peter wouldn’t put anything past this city. His neighbor at East Ninety-Sixth had once lifted the lid of his toilet to find a boa constrictor. And one morning Peter had come in before dawn to make stock and demi-glace only to find, waddling happily around the floor of his office, a skunk.

  He lifted the candle and walked back down the hallway, feeling absurdly like the miser Peter had read about in his nighttime English-language classes, Ebenezer Scrooge. All he lacked was the nightgown and cap. “Hello?” he said again, opening the ladies’ room door. “Is anybody here?” He shone the flame around the little pink-tiled room. It was flickering—the window was indeed open—but he didn’t need its uncertain light to see the door to the second stall open and from it emerge, her hair rumpled and makeup mussed, the girl. The young woman from the center table.

  * * *

  Peter got her settled at the bar, gathering and lighting candles from nearby tables and pouring them both drinks—although he then realized the girl hadn’t asked for one. She looked at it, sitting on the zinc bar amid a glittering semicircle of tea lights, which reflected in the mirror behind the liquor bottles and sent infinite glimmers into the dark.

  “It’s only brandy,” said Peter. “I may pretend to wizardry in the kitchen, but I’m a poor bartender.”

  “As long as it’s brown and strong,” said the girl, “I don’t mind what it is.”

  She tossed it back in a businesslike fashion and with a horselike huff. This accomplished, she banged the glass down and tapped its rim with a white-nailed finger.

  “Hit me again,” she said, and Peter did, taking a moment to translate the command. It had been a long time since he had stumbled over an idiom; this blackout had done something to him, uncoupled hard-earned language and opened unwelcome doors in his mind. He hoped the lights would come back on soon, though in a way that was irrelevant; it was disconcerting to discover how easily one’s defenses were still undone.

  This girl took her second brandy with more decorum, arcing her long neck down to the snifter in a way that put Peter in mind of a giraffe he had recently seen at a fund-raiser in the Central Park Zoo, delicately lipping leaves off a tree. Peter handed her his handkerchief.

  “What’s this for?” she asked. Peter pointed to his own face, smiling. The girl swung on her stool and confronted her reflection in the mirror.

  “Oh God,” she said and dipped Peter’s handkerchief in her brandy to wipe her streaked makeup from her cheeks. She turned to him questioningly, and he nodded.

  “You missed a spot, just there,” he said and almost but not quite touched her left temple.

  The girl leaned forward to take care of it. “Thank you,” she said and started to pass Peter’s handkerchief back. He shook his head, and her neck above her white fur collar mottled in a blush that could be embarrassment, or heat from the candles, or both.

  “Oh, of course you wouldn’t want it back this way,” she said. “I’ll have it dry-cleaned and sent to you.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Peter. You could return it yourself, he was about to say, when the girl let out a gusty sigh and ran her hands through her very short blond hair. Divested of her fashionable heavy makeup, she looked like a child—her lashes pale, her extraordinary high cheekbones lightly freckled—and, Peter thought, even more fetching this way.

  “You must think I’m an awful baby,” she said.

  “Hardly,” he said, “although you do appear quite young.”

  She smiled, the expression transforming her face with a sweetness that reminded Peter of everything American: sugary cereal, Crest toothpaste, fabric softener, milk.

  “Go on,” she said. “I’m twenty-five. Practically an old maid.”

  “An infant,” said Peter. “If you stay out much longer, I shall have to call your governess.”

  Now she laughed and toasted him. “Cin cin.”

  “Prost,” said Peter automatically. He winced and drained his brandy.

  The girl watched him curiously over the rim of her snifter. “I’m sorry about all that hysteria in the ladies’ room.”

  “I don’t see why,” said Peter. “If one must weep, the ladies’ lounge seems the ideal place for it.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m a crybaby.”

  “Of course not,” said Peter. “I’m sure you’re usually tough as nails.”

  “I am,” she agreed and finished off her drink. She pushed the glass toward Peter, who obligingly refilled it. “It was just a hell of a night.”

  “Your . . . gentleman friend?” Peter asked, hoping to be told he was a cousin—or uncle.

  “No, it wasn’t him,” she said, and Peter was examining his feeling of deflation when she added, “He was a creep, but garden-variety. You know the type, the kind of guy who thinks just because he takes a girl out for drinks she owes him a roll in the hay. I wouldn’t’ve even bothered with him—he was a blind date—but my friend Dominique said he was some bigwig producer with CBS, with contacts to Hollywood. Turns out he was just a lousy writer.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Peter gravely. He wanted to laugh.

  “Yes, well, around drink three or so he started putting the moves on me—he was a real smoothie, ol’ Allen or Alfred or whatever his name was. First he did the yawn and stretch to drape his arm over my shoulder and cop a feel. Next thing you know he dropped his lighter and had to fish around under the table for it—and up my skirt. I swear he jammed his hand up there as if it were a cigarette machine or something.”

  “Good Lord,” said Peter. “If I’d known, I would have done something about it.”

&
nbsp; “Would you?” The girl looked at him sideways, her first coquettish gesture of the night, Peter thought. “What would you have done?”

  “There are plenty of cleavers back there,” said Peter, indicating the kitchen. She laughed. “Or if you prefer a less dramatic solution, I could always have thrown the bum out.”

  The girl smiled. “I believe you would. You strike me as a perfect gentleman.”

  “Sadly, yes,” said Peter. “So you were crying over this bum, Albert or Alfred? That hardly strikes me as being tough as nails.”

  “Oh, God, no,” she said. “Not him. I did what I always do with creeps—told him I was going to the ladies’ room, then stayed in there long enough so he’d leave. Only I must’ve had a highball too many, because I fell asleep—you know, you could use a chaise in there or something.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “And when I woke up,” she said, “everyone was gone and it was dark. As in pitch dark, as in I couldn’t tell where the door was, as in I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I dropped my lighter, and I couldn’t find it, and I just . . .” She shrugged, which turned into a shudder. “Ugh, the dark,” she said. “I’ve hated it since I was a little girl. My mom locked me in a rut cellar once and forgot me in there. She said it was for my own good, that there was a bad storm coming, and that it wasn’t as long as I thought. But I know she forgot. And it was hours in that total darkness. Hours.” She rubbed her arms, which were, like her legs, almost preternaturally long and white. “The dark still gives me the meemies.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Peter.

  “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  The girl’s eyes, wide and silver-blue, scanned Peter’s face. “I believe you.”

  “I am unclear on one thing, however,” said Peter. “What is a rut cellar?”

  “What?” the girl said, then laughed. “Oh, sorry, root. ‘Rut’ is the way they say it where I come from.”

  “And where would that be? This place where mothers lock little girls in cellars?”

  “Minnesota,” the girl said. “Land of a Thousand Lakes.”

  “And rut cellars,” said Peter, exaggerating the foreign word. He thought he knew what she meant now; his family’s cook, Hilde, had kept a similar storeroom on the Charlottenburg estate where Peter had grown up, a dank underground space lined with hundreds of jars of rotkraut, Spargel—white asparagus—with dill, and pickles. The decades of preserves had been smashed in a single night’s bombing, but they were the reason Peter still canned his own for Masha’s.

  The girl held out her empty snifter, and Peter replenished it and his. “To escaping the dark,” he said, and they clinked glasses.

  “Where are you from?” she said. “I’m guessing not the Bronx.”

  “I’m from long ago and far away,” said Peter. The girl raised a half-moon eyebrow at him. He sighed. “Europe,” he said.

  “Not France, either. Are you from—”

  “Germany.”

  The girl sat up a little straighter. “From before or after the war?”

  “After. Just.”

  “I thought so. Your accent . . .”

  “And here I thought I’d done such a good job erasing it.”

  “Oh, you have,” she assured him. “It’s very slight. But it’s also something about the way you carry yourself. A little more formal.”

  “Like a headwaiter?” Peter said.

  “Like the guy in that movie,” she said, “you know the one . . .” She cast about, snapping her fingers in frustration. “The guy with all the kids and the whistle? You must know what I mean.”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I think I’ve drunk more than I thought,” she said. “Anyway. Do you ever . . . go back? Do you miss it?”

  Only an American, thought Peter, and only a young American, could ask such a question. Did he miss Germany? Had they taught no history in her American school?

  “I have not gone back,” he said carefully, and then, “And you? Do you miss being in your land of lakes?”

  To his astonishment, the girl’s chin started to quiver, and then she began to cry. She unfurled one of her long arms down across the bar and dropped her head onto it and sobbed.

  “No,” she wept. “Not at all. Not—at—all! I got out of there as soon as I could—so I wouldn’t turn into every other woman there. They all get married right out of high school, if they even finish, and by the time they’re my age they have middle-aged spread and perms and six kids! I spent my whole life trying to avoid that!”

  By which you mean your whole twenty-odd years, Peter thought. The girl’s back heaved; she was so slender he could see the knobs of her spine through the white fabric of her dress, beneath its tracery of silver brocade. Her boy’s haircut came to a tiny elfin comma on the nape of her neck. He reached his hand out to comfort her, then pulled it away.

  “But here you are,” he said reasonably. “Safe, all the way in New York.”

  She turned her face partially toward him, her cheeks and eyes swollen and streaming. “But that’s just it,” she cried, “I’m not safe at all. Now that Twiggy’s here . . . ,” and she released a fresh torrent of tears. “That’s why they made me cut my hair like this,” she said, yanking at it, “so I could compete with the British Invasion. It’s not enough to be pretty anymore, or to show up early for every shoot, or to weigh ninety-nine pounds in your shoes—you have to be exotic, too. That’s the new look! And I can’t! I’m not! I can’t compete with horrible scary Peggy Moffitt or beautiful Negresses like Donyale Luna. I had three bookings canceled this week. I’m going to get sent home to marry some farmer!” and she cried and cried.

  Peter waited, and finally he did rest a palm on her back. He could feel the living warmth of it, and her vertebrae, too. She was so thin. He felt two things: first, exasperation that any woman should deliberately starve herself so, even for the sake of a career. He remembered, against his will, other women with equally short hair—though less artfully shorn—their bones protruding the same way; one, in the DP camp Peter had shared with her in Bremerhaven, died from eating a chocolate bar a well-meaning American soldier had given her too soon. How Peter should like to shake this girl, to remind her of what was important, to feed her crème brulée, foie gras, Brie en croute . . . Yet he admired her, too, for having the tenacity to leave her home at such a tender age and come to a hard city where she knew no one, to make her fortune; unlike Peter, she had done so by choice rather than necessity. If it had been a long time since Peter had touched a woman, aside from bumping elbows in the kitchen or a hasty coupling with a stranger no more meaningful than a sneeze and just as imperative, so too had it been ages since Peter had encountered any woman with an ambition beyond securing a handsome and well-situated husband.

  I will someday be the first female chef in Berlin, in my very own restaurant, said a voice in his head. Oh, Petel, do you think it’s possible?

  Peter took his hand off the girl. It was slightly damp.

  “Now listen here,” he said. “I have met this Twiggy, and she is a fire in the pan, believe me. She won’t last more than a few months.”

  The girl turned her face sideways and blinked. “Oh, you mean a flash in the pan.”

  “Yes, that’s it. She is merely a trend, whereas you, your looks are timeless.”

  “You’re too sweet,” the girl said automatically. Slowly she sat up, wiping her face with the heels of her palms. “You’ve really met Twiggy? Wh-where?” she hiccupped.

  “Why, here, of course. She and her friends descend on Masha’s like a plague of locusts, order everything on the menu, and eat nothing of it. A colossal waste of food. Right before closing time as well.”

  The girl laughed. “Of course she wouldn’t eat anything. She cuh-can’t,” she hiccoughed. “Occupational huh-hazard.”

  “She is quite louche,” Peter said firmly. “You have nothing to fear from her.” He held out his hand. “Don’t talk for a moment. Stay sti
ll.”

  He ran a glass of water behind the bar, shook out a napkin over it like a magician performing a trick, and pushed it toward her. “Drink it,” he said. “All of it. Through the cloth.”

  “Whu—”

  “Please,” he said, and the girl drank, watching him over the glass. Her long lovely throat worked above her fur collar. When she was done, Peter applauded.

  “There, you see?” he said.

  “No—,” she said, then put a hand to her throat. “Oh, I do! They’re gone. The hiccups. How did you know to do that?”

  “My . . . somebody I knew long ago taught me,” said Peter.

  “Well, thank whoever it was for me,” said the girl. “It’s a neat trick.”

  She looked at her watch and slid from her stool. “It’s so late,” she said. “I have an eight o’clock booking. I really have to go.”

  She had made it almost all the way to the door before Peter, startled by her abrupt exodus, recovered himself and caught up with her.

  “Wait,” he said. “You can’t leave.”

  She gave him a suspicious look. Although Peter stood six feet in his socks, her eyes were almost level with his. “And why not?”

  “Your coat,” he said.

  She laughed. “Oh. Right.”

  Peter retrieved her jacket, the only one left in the cloakroom; it was a collection of blond fur that looked like a litter of stitched-together Pomeranians. He stood behind her as she slipped her arms into it; the garment was longer than her minidress, so once she had fastened it, it looked as though she were wearing only the coat and high boots. The illusion was bewitching, impossible to look away from. The girl stood by the door, waiting.

  Peter felt in his pocket for his handkerchief, but the girl had left it on the bar. He reached past her to unfasten the lock; she smelled of cigarettes and Chanel No. 5 and, beneath those, something like fresh salted butter. Her carefully contrived sideburns came to little points in front of each ear.