Forgiving Ararat

by Gita Nazareth

  “I trust you are satisfied,” he replies.

  “Yes,” Amina says, more coldly now and in the manner with which she dispatched the newsprint salesman. She exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke. “I’m sure Hanz told you I would require authentication. Someone from the Albright-Knox Museum will look at it this afternoon. Assuming there is no problem, you may return at four-thirty for your passports.”

  Hanson looks at the painting and then back at Amina, forcing a smile from his lips.

  “Yes, thank you,” he says, bowing his head slightly. He turns and walks out of the office. Amina closes the door behind him.

  “Victim?” Elymas whispers.

  I am seated between him and Luas, watching the presentation. Hanz Stossel stands at the center of the Urartu Chamber, presenting his former client. A shaft of light courses through him, carrying away the fragments of Amina Rabun’s life and splashing them into the room.

  “Of what?” I respond, absorbed by the presentation.

  Amina props the canvas up on her credenza, leaning books against the corners to keep it erect. She steps back to imagine how it will look when framed. From this perspective, taking more time to observe and admire, the mourners in the painting appear to her as her own family must have appeared when carrying Helmut to his tomb beneath the twisted girders and broken concrete of the memorial her father had assembled for him from the debris of his school.

  “Victim of injustice,” Elymas says.

  Amina wipes away tears as the memory of that terrible day envelopes her. She has been so consumed with the horror of Kamenz all these years that she has rarely thought of poor Helmut. She succumbs to the unanswerable guilt of such neglect, and of having named the press for her cousin, Bette, instead of her own brother or her own mother or father.

  “The creature weeps,” Elymas whispers. “You feel her anguish, Brek Cuttler. But where is the compassion of her Creator? Can you feel that touching her soul? Does the throne express even the slightest concern? One tender thought or word? Where is justice? When will the scales be balanced?”

  But Helmut’s death was, in the final analysis, an accident. The Allied pilots could not have known their bombs would raze a school. They did not look Helmut in the eyes and execute him, and that is why she has been willing to forgive them and, therefore, to forget. But not the Russians. No, their crime was deliberate and their faces depraved. There can be no forgiveness for them. Ever.

  This self-pitying does not last long, Survivor Amina will not permit it. She dabs the mascara stains from her cheeks and blows her nose. She resolves to display Cloister Graveyard in the Snow in memory of her brother Helmut and to tell those who ask that it means this to her. And then an idea strikes Survivor Amina. She has been planning to publish a letter in the paper, timed to coincide with the death, one year ago, of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Amina had supported McCarthy, using his rabid patriotism as a means of disguising her German heritage. Embracing McCarthy made as much good business sense to the Register in the nineteen-fifties as did embracing the Nazis to the economic well-being of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons in the nineteen-thirties; but there was also a deeper emotional attraction to McCarthy, for he stood alone in Amina’s mind as the only one who truly understood the evil of Russia and the suffering of its victims. These understandings became the germ of Amina’s forthcoming Letter from the Publisher. She would explain in personal terms what the Rabuns of Kamenz had lost to the Red hoards—and she would bravely contrast that with what they lost to the Allied bombs. It would be a moving, convincing, wonderful letter. A fitting tribute to Joseph McCarthy.

  The light gushing through Hanz Stossel in the Chamber changes color, signaling that the presentation of Amina Rabun is about to shift forward in time. I am deeply concerned with Stossel’s selections for the presentation. Why has he omitted Amina’s life in Germany and the sacrifices she made for the Schriebergs? Why is he presenting only the dark side of her life and character? And why is Hanz Stossel, who figured such a prominent role in Amina Rabun’s life as friend, confidant, and advisor, presenting her case at all?

  24

  * * *

  The presentation of Amina Rabun continues.

  Each February, Amina Rabun vacationed on the Caribbean island of Aruba. Buffalo winters could be tolerated only so long. She rented a villa on the leeward side of the island with a luxurious stretch of white sand beach owned by an executive who found it convenient when visiting his company’s oil refineries at the southern end of the island. Amina favored Aruba over other Caribbean destinations for the European architecture of Orangestad and its popularity among German vacationers. Bathed in the desert island’s orange sun and warm turquoise waters, the past for Amina was sanitized, the vessel of memory was freshened, and the delicious summers of her childhood, when the Rabuns of Kamenz vacationed on the French Mediterranean coast, were restored like ancient frescoes under the tender hands of a doting archeologist.

  One such vacation occurs in February, nineteen seventy-four. After a three week respite, Amina returns to her drafty home in Buffalo accompanied by Albrecht Bosch, who has enjoyed his second visit to the island as her companion. Amina and Albrecht have become intimate friends but not lovers, for Amina is adamantly asexual and Albrecht adamantly homosexual. They learned these secrets about each other the day they first met, in a bright tavern in the Allentown section of the city on the second anniversary of Amina’s divorce, which also happened to be the first anniversary of the day Albrecht ended a relationship with an artist who convinced him to come to Buffalo from Chicago. And so it was a common nationality and a common fate that brought Amina and Albrecht together—but it was Bette Press that made them inseparable. Albrecht Bosch was in love with the printed word. He would invite anyone who would listen into his magical world of typefaces and printing presses and, once there, explain with an artist’s passion how a simple serif can arouse anger or evoke serenity, and how paper texture and weight can be grave or lyrical, pompous or comforting. He introduced Amina to the ancient struggle between legibility and creativity that ties typography to tradition like no other art form and allows for only subtle innovation; and like Amina’s early teachers of romanticism, he appealed to her Germanic pride by reminding her that Johann Gutenberg gifted the printing press to humanity. In the joyful marriage of paper and ink that followed, Amina and Albrecht experienced the harmony of opposites that had eluded their private lives.

  For the past two years, Amina and Albrecht have resided in separate rooms of her small, slowly decaying mansion on Delaware Avenue, built in the nineteen-twenties by a Great Lakes shipping baron. The house is cold when the travelers arrive from their journey to the tropics, infuriating Amina because she had left specific instructions for the housekeeper to turn up the heat two days before their return. Amina asks Albrecht to adjust the thermostat and light a fire in the study, then heads for the mail, which has been stacked neatly for her on the large mahogany dining room table. She scans through the envelopes quickly, searching for anything that looks important or interesting, setting aside the monotony of bills and solicitations. Two envelopes fit the former criteria: a large, beige square of heavy cotton fiber bond addressed to “Ms. Amina Rabun and Guest,” and a menacing business envelope with a return address of “Weinstein & Goldman, Attorneys-at-Law.” She takes both envelopes into the kitchen, puts on a pot of water for tea, and opens the invitation first. To Survivor Amina’s delight, she reads that the prestigious Niagara Society has, for the first time, requested the favor of her presence at its annual Spring Ball—the social event in Buffalo each year.

  “Albrecht!” she calls.

  “What is it?” Albrecht groans with his head in the fireplace trying to resuscitate a few fading embers. He has already gone through half a Sunday newspaper but still can’t coax the wood to ignite.

  “We’re going to the Niagara Society Ball!” Amina sings. “Get your tuxedo pressed.”

  “Not if I die of asphyxiation first,” Albrecht coughs.


  The telephone rings as the water comes to a boil.

  “Can you get that, Albrecht?” Amina asks. “The tea’s on.”

  Albrecht takes the call in the living room while Amina pours the bubbling water into a creamy Beleek teapot. She adds Earl Gray tea leaves to the infuser; sets a tray with two matching cups, milk and sugar, the invitation, and the letter and carries the tray into to the study. After settling into her favorite wingback chair and fixing herself a cup, she opens the envelope from the law firm, finding the enclosed letter:

  Dear Ms. Rabun:

  I represent Mrs. Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson in her capacity as Executrix of the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Jared A. Schrieberg.

  As you know, my client has written to you on several occasions concerning ownership of certain theaters and real property in Dresden acquired by your family from the decedents during the war for the sum of 35,000 Reichmarks, equivalent at the time to approximately $22,000 U.S. You no doubt realize the purchase price was far below fair market value and the sale was made under duress and threat of seizure of the property by the Nazi government and incarceration of the decedents in the Nazi death camps. Therefore the sale was and is, invalid.

  Mrs. Schrieberg-Wolfson, on behalf of the Estate, seeks rescission of the purchase contract and return of all property. In that connection, she has previously offered in writing to refund you the $22,000 plus interest from the date of the sale. You have not responded to Mrs. Schrieberg-Wolfson’s offer and she has, therefore, retained me to take the necessary steps to rescind the contract and recover the property or its value.

  My research has disclosed that your family no longer owns the property, it having been sold in 1949, at your personal direction, by Mr. Hanz Stossel, Esquire. I am in the process of determining the compensation received from that sale. I also understand that although the property had been purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Otto Rabun and not you directly, the proceeds of the sale were paid to you personally, or in trust for their daughter and your prior ward, Barratte Rabun. As I do not know the location of Ms. Rabun, I ask that you pass this correspondence on to her if appropriate.

  Assuming the property was sold by you for fair market value, my client has authorized me to accept the proceeds of that sale plus interest, minus the purchase price, in full payment and settlement of the Estate’s claims. We believe fair market value in today’s dollars would equal at least $3,500,000 U.S. If such an arrangement cannot be reached, we will be forced to initiate legal proceedings to invalidate the purchase and to recover the full value of the property. We believe the courts in this country and Germany will be sympathetic to these claims.

  My client deeply regrets the need to resort to the courts, but is firm in her resolve. She is and shall forever be grateful to you for sheltering her family during those terrible years, and has expressed as much in her letters to you. This is, however, a matter of the unfair acquisition of property by your uncle under extreme conditions. As a result of that action, my client and her surviving family were forced to live in relative poverty compared to the lifestyle which you and your family have enjoyed. Mrs. Schrieberg-Wolfson seeks no more than to right that wrong; she bears neither you nor Miss Barratte Rabun any ill will.

  I am authorized to initiate legal proceedings if I receive no response from you to this letter. In light of your position as publisher of a newspaper, it would seem that the negative publicity surrounding such a case would prove very uncomfortable. In that regard, our investigators have learned that Otto Rabun was a member of the Waffen SS and that your father’s construction firm, from which much of your family’s wealth emerged, was under contract to build the crematoria at Majdanek, Treblinka, and Oswiecim. Such extraordinary facts will be difficult to conceal from the public in litigation.

  I look forward to your prompt response.

  Very truly yours,

  Robert Goldman, Esq.

  “How dare she threaten me!” Amina fumes.

  Amina had received letters from Katerine Schrieberg and thrown all of them away. She had come to see the Schriebergs as responsible for the horror of Kamenz. While the Russian soldiers murdered members of her family and raped her and her cousins, the Schriebergs remained huddled in a Rabun hunting cabin nearby and did nothing, risked nothing; when she ran to them for help the next morning, they were gone. Indeed, Amina had come to blame all Jews for these things: in her view they had sunk Germany into poverty and, ultimately, war, and their outrageous claims about death camps had defamed her father and uncle and shamed the nation. Now this, after all their cowardice, after all Amina had risked to protect them, Katerine Schrieberg repays her by threatening to ruin her? It was too much. Amina takes the letter to the hearth, ignites it with one of the matches left behind by Albrecht, and places it into the fireplace on top of the charred newspaper, warming her hands by its flames.

  “What’s going on in there?” Albrecht calls from the living room. “Barratte’s on the phone, do you want to speak to her?”

  This news startles Amina even more than the letter. She has not spoken to Barratte in nearly twenty years. The bond between cousins strained when Amina decided to flee Germany with Captain Meinert and take Barratte with them. Barratte despised the Americans for the death of her father in Berlin as much as she despised the Russians for the deaths of her mother, sister, and brothers in Kamenz. She considered Amina a traitor to Germany for marrying an American soldier, and a traitor to their family for liquidating their assets and running. Brought to the United States against her will, Barratte did not adjust well. She found the language and customs difficult, performed poorly in school, and was unable to make friends. The other children—children of American veterans dead and alive—tormented her as a Nazi in their midst, an orphaned “Kraut girl” whose parents and country got what they had coming. She never revealed to them the horrific price she and her family had paid in Kamenz. Her teen years were spent in quiet desperation; she substituted her rape with a story that she had seduced and slept with young German officers at the age of eleven, bragging about this to the other girls and, in this way, finding acceptance among them as worldly and exotic, responding to her trauma in the exact opposite manner of her cousin. She found acceptance, too, among older boys, who were pleased to find a willing, experienced partner regardless of background and accent. Barratte thus developed an unflattering reputation, and this eventually found its way to Amina, who was furious but, privately, jealous that her young niece seemingly had been able to put Kamenz behind her in this way. As her guardian, Amina punished Barratte severely for her behavior, and in response, Barratte grew colder and bided her time. Within weeks of her eighteenth birthday, she hired a lawyer, took control of her inheritance, and left for New York City. Amina knew little about Barratte’s life during the years after that. The surprise telephone call on that cold Saturday in February came to her as a complete shock.

  “What does she want, Albrecht? Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s wonderful!” Albrecht replies. “Barratte had a baby boy this morning! Seven pounds, five ounces! She named him Otto Rabun Bowles! You’re a grandmother, or a great aunt, or something, Amina! Here, come speak to her!”

  The Urartu Chamber reappears. “A decision has been made,” Legna announces with the hollow voice of a proctor calling time, terminating the presentation of Amina Rabun before the final essay on her life can be completed. Another postulant in Shemaya graded on less than half her work.

  “Well done,” Luas says, shaking Hanz Stossel’s hand.

  “Yes, well done.” Elymas agrees. “Well done.”

  “We’re going out tonight,” Nana said.

  It was late afternoon and we were in the study. She was reading, of all things, the 1897 Farmer’s Almanac—the year she was born—and I was needlepointing a Christmas stocking for Sarah. We had never gone out before. I pulled the needle through the fabric.

  “Where?” I asked.

  I had started the stocking when I was pregnant; it would have been fi
nished in time for Sarah’s first Christmas. I picked it back up again when I went home to meet Elymas after the presentation of Amina Rabun. I waited for days, but he never came. Doing something with my hands (hand)—doing something for Sarah—became my way of mourning, and protesting, her death. I decided to act as though she was still alive—that we were both still living. I made bottles of formula for her every morning and ran her a bath; I washed her tiny clothes and crib sheets; I drove to the daycare and then to work, and back to the daycare and then to the convenience store. The unmarked police car flashed its lights to pull me over, but I kept driving until it disappeared from the mirror. When the loneliness became too great, I returned to Nana’s house and brought the stocking back with me to finish.

  “It’s a surprise,” she said, her lips spreading into a smile. This was actually the first time we’d spoken since I came back. We had spent several days silently passing each other in the house.

  “I don’t think I can take any more surprises,” I said.

  “Elymas does have a flair for them,” Nana replied. “It’s part of his charm, I suppose. But I wouldn’t trust everything he says and does.”

  I looked at her. “Should I trust you?”

  “You should trust the truth, child.”

  “What is the truth, Nana?”

  “The truth is what makes you feel calm and loved, nothing more than that.”

  “That’s meaningless.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s the only meaning. Truth is never anger or fear. They’re illusions, and Elymas traffics in them.”

  I looped the thread and pushed the needle back through the fabric. I was working on the toe of an angel blowing a trumpet.