Kingdom of Twilight

by Steven Uhly

  Anna’s eyes began to weep tears. Nobody saw it, not Peretz, who was driving, nor Shimon, who had fallen asleep. She said, “It looked just like the Nauen sign. It was a couple of meters back there at the side of the road. On it was written:

  Attention all Jews

  The way to Palestine

  does not pass

  through this town!”

  She fell silent for a while before saying, “I didn’t understand it. And I didn’t think it had anything to do with me either, because . . .” she faltered, “I had no idea that I was a Jew. I was from Nauen, from Brandenburg, a German and then at some point in time, a long way back, I had Jewish ancestors.”

  “Didn’t your parents tell you anything?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Not at all! Look, my father was a psychoanalyst. We were always short of money; he didn’t have many patients. He tried publishing scientific articles to earn a bit more and build up a reputation.” She sighed. “Once he said to me: In Germany there’s only a limited number of newspapers, but there are millions of people out of work who have plenty of time on their hands to write articles.” She fell silent again.

  Peretz turned right into Mittelstrasse, now they were driving northward, heading straight for the old town. Looking out of the window, Anna said, “My mother was an artist. She had contact with painters in Berlin and northern Germany, our apartment was full of her paintings, strange paintings in which everything was portrayed oddly. She wrote things I didn’t understand. She met up with intellectuals in cafés and discussed abstract topics that didn’t interest me. She wandered around town in a trouser suit.” Anna smiled. “I found my mother embarrassing.”

  Peretz glanced at Anna. Their eyes met. Then he turned into Kirchstrasse. The Protestant church, the advertising column, the tall house. Götze’s shoemakers. In the background, the mansion in Goethestrasse, the road leading north parallel to Mittelstrasse, through the heart of the circular old town. Kirchstrasse 32. Peretz stopped the car, the engine died. The street was absolutely quiet, there was nobody to be seen. Lunchtime. Blazing sunlight was reflected in the layer of snow that shrouded everything.

  Peretz leaned back and looked at Anna. Anna was not moving. Through her window she stared at number 32, a low house in a terrace of identical buildings, ground floor, first floor, gabled roof. A hundred years old at most, workers must have lived here. Anna looked at the two small windows to either side of the front door. The curtains were drawn. Softly, she said:

  “Now you have come

  how do you feel in my heart

  what do you wish to do? Now

  you have come

  the only way forward is with me

  I shall name a star after you

  the most famous one, you see

  you have embraced speech too,

  now you have come.”

  She fell silent, turned her head to Peretz and smiled, tears were streaming down her face, a physical reaction to the irritants of the past and present. Peretz said nothing, poetry unsettled him, there was something naked and weak about it that made him nervous.

  “She wrote that for my father when they made their peace and he came back home. A few years before the sign appeared on the way into town.”

  She tightened her grip on the sleeping Shimon, Peretz hurried to get out, he walked around the car and opened Anna’s door, it was complicated, it opened the opposite way, but he knew how to do it.

  He stood there like a chauffeur as Anna got out of the car with the sleeping child and looked up. She harbored no hope, hopelessness was her ideal technique, it had got her this far, through everything.

  Without hope Anna knocked at the low front door.

  Without hope she waited for someone to open.

  Without hope she heard footsteps approaching in the hallway.

  Without hope her heart was in her mouth when the door opened, to reveal an unfamiliar, slender, short woman with an apron and headscarf, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and giving her an inquiring look. Anna wanted to say something, there were tears in her eyes, the woman was confused. Anna opened her mouth and closed it again, the woman looked at Peretz, Peretz came closer. “Is this the Stirnweisses’ house?” he said.

  The woman shook her head. Anna gazed at the woman’s dress, the necklace she was wearing. She looked beyond the woman, catching a glimpse of the furniture. There were tears in her eyes. She smiled at the woman. The woman blinked back uncertainly. Anna asked softly after people, still smiling and still with tears in her eyes.

  Joseph Stirnweiss?

  Chawa Stirnweiss?

  Eta Stirnweiss?

  Benjamin Stirnweiss?

  With every name the woman shook her head, We understand each other, Anna thought, How well we understand each other.

  “The dress suits you,” she said. “And the necklace.”

  Instinctively the woman placed a hand on the necklace, just below her collarbone. Anna smiled at her.

  “Be sure to look after it. It belongs to the dead.”

  “Don’t you want to go in?” Peretz asked all of a sudden. “Don’t you want to take a few things at least?”

  The woman looked aghast at Peretz and cast anxious glances at Anna, who had tears in her eyes.

  Anna slowly shook her head, turned and left. Away from the house. To the right, along the street. Without saying goodbye, without waiting for Peretz. Peretz watched her, his mouth agape, the woman at the door looked both shocked and relieved, her hand still on her décolleté. His eyes full of rage, Peretz said, “If it were up to me, I’d take everything away from you, you damn Nazis!”

  Then he followed his wife.

  Anna walked through the streets of her childhood. The snow crunched beneath her feet, the baby in her arms weighed practically nothing and yet she felt his weight like a burden. She walked with a stoop, her shoulders hunched forward, as if with this gesture trying to protect the child from the world. She turned into Goethestrasse, on the right-hand side stood the Jewish house of prayer, Anna had been there when it was destroyed. She had just turned eighteen at the time. The morning after all the noise, the racket and the screams, she had gone out into the street, full of curiosity, she and her sisters. Following the smoke they ended up at the house of prayer, still thinking some sort of accident had occurred. But then they saw the words daubed on the walls, the smashed windows, and Anna remembered the sign that had been put up some time before on the way into town.

  Now Anna took the same route again. Just after she turned right into Goethestrasse a door opened on the opposite side of the road and a young woman came out. She looked shapeless with her thin coat, beneath which she was clearly wearing several layers of clothes. There was only a narrow gap in her long brown hair, her face was barely visible. But Anna recognized her all the same. She stopped. A single car drove past, a two-seater. This image would remain imprinted on her memory for the rest of her life: the woman on the other side of the road, the car coming toward both of them and then vanishing behind her back, taking its noise somewhere, and then silence again, only her and the woman in the street, both walking in the same direction, the woman could not see Anna as she was slightly ahead. Anna crossed the road. She broke into a run to catch up. Then she was with her, walking beside her, the woman turned around, looked at her in surprise, Anna smiled, the woman stopped. A question had appeared in her face, which ought to have perplexed Anna, but she was so happy finally to have found someone that she ignored it.

  “Lena!” she said. “It’s me, Anna! Anna Stirnweiss!”

  The woman gave her a bewildered look, she frowned, she appeared to be straining, as if having to peer through a fog to see something. But then she gave up and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know you.”

  Anna opened her mouth. She wanted to say something, She wanted to say, Don’t you remember? We used to be inseparable. We wanted to do everything together. We had secrets we shared with nobody else. Don’t you remember the s
ummer of twenty-six, when we learned to swim? Autumn forty-two when we swore never to let each other down? She wanted to say, Sure, there were breaks in our friendship, but we always got back together, don’t you remember? She wanted to say, Look at me, I haven’t changed that much, have I? She wanted to show her Shimon, He’s the son of an Aryan, she almost said.

  She said nothing. She stood in front of the woman who did not remember her and said, “Apologies. I must be mistaken.” She turned away and saw Peretz standing on the other side of the street, looking over at her. She ran to him.

  43

  Frau Kramer told Lisa everything. The two of them were sitting in Café Seetempel on Brodtner Ufer in Travemünde, gazing out at the sea. It was windy, the Baltic smote its waves into the cliff-lined coast, the sun sat high in the sky, shooting its hot rays onto everything beneath, the glittering water, the bathers down on the beach and the two women sitting at a round table on top of the cliff, drinking coffee in the shade of an umbrella. The café was full, well-dressed people stood all around waiting for a free table, but Frau Kramer and Lisa Ejzenstain barely noticed. They were sunk deep in the past.

  The past began in Ostra in southern Bukovina, Take your time, Lisa had said, Tell me all about your life, start at the beginning, and I don’t want any lies. Frau Kramer had swallowed, she was so used to inserting Margarita into the storybooks she presented to Lisa that it almost sounded wrong when now she began to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Once more she spoke of her parents, who had no more to say to each other after their eighth child, of her father, who had died when she was still a young girl, of her mother, who had ruled the house with an iron hand, of her siblings, who one after the other left Ostra, and one day only she remained, the youngest, helping her mother look after the farmhouse, the animals, the field and her grandmother, who sat in a chair doing nothing but talk about the past, endless stories that were like little loops, repeating themselves just as endlessly. Frau Kramer spoke of Wilhelm Kramer, a neighbor, a shy young lad, the only one who did not amuse himself by teasing the girls, but started observing her at an early age. Frau Kramer spoke of their wedding, the death of her grandmother, her sick mother, who died herself a year later, how William moved in with her to take over the running of the farm, He hadn’t counted on that, she said, I mean, he was the youngest of the Kramer brothers, only the eldest inherited to avoid the land being broken up into parcels, and the others either stayed on to help or left. Frau Kramer spoke of Karl’s birth, she smiled and cried at the same time when she spoke of her son, who never got into trouble, who had more friends in the village than anyone else, who many mothers would have loved to have had as a son-in-law, but Karl cared only for his friends, he was not interested in girls, and this went on even as he got bigger, Frau Kramer said, her smile now replaced by an expression of slight bafflement. Then she sighed and spoke of Maria, barely able to find the right words for this baby who seemed to cry for no reason, for this small child who never slept when she was supposed to, for this girl who started eyeing up the boys far too young, for this adolescent who skipped school to meet men and ultimately stopped making any distinction between fathers and their sons. At some point the whole village had turned against her, and obviously against us too, Frau Kramer said, sighing again and looking sad. She gazed at Lisa, who had forgotten her coffee because over the course of the story she realized that her grandmother had lied not only about her and her mother, but much more besides, it was as if she had spoken of only one half of a picture but never the other.

  “There was an office in Gura Humora, the Ethnic Germans’ Liaison Office, people called it VoMi. William and I went there with our ox cart, we went there in the morning and came back in the evening. That’s how the S.S. entered our lives.” Frau Kramer said nothing about the boarded-up shops belonging to the many Austrian Jews who lived in Gura Humora, she failed to mention the countless empty houses and apartments they passed with their ox cart, which told the tale that the Jews were gone. She kept silent about the fact that they had continued on their way without exchanging a word until they got to VoMi, where they presented themselves and were put down on a list. Nor did she say anything about the people in Ostra who became euphoric when they sat in the village pub and listened to Hitler speak on the wireless set that the S.S. had paid for. Frau Kramer stuck to the family history, Everything else, she told herself, can’t be of any interest to Lisa because it’s over, thank God. So she spoke of Karl’s reluctance to move, He didn’t want to lose his friends, she spoke of Maria’s indifference, But Maria spent so long knocking about in the neighboring villages and even in Gura Humora that it was a miracle she didn’t come home pregnant one day. Frau Kramer shed a few tears, but this was not about her and her emotions, it was about Lisa, which is why she pulled herself together and spoke of the difficult journey with all their worldly goods, the S.S. had arranged a trek exclusively for Germans from Bukovina who wanted to go back home to the Reich. When they spoke to the others they realized that most of them had good reasons for moving, only a few parroted back the words of the agents who had traveled from village to village, holding forth about the Thousand-Year German Reich, the Aryan race, the progress of civilization, Germanness, the renewal movement and whatever other nonsense that spewed from their mouths. For weeks we wandered across the country like gypsies, said Frau Kramer, who knew next to nothing about gypsies, For weeks we watched Maria coming on to the S.S. boys and the S.S. boys courting our son. Frau Kramer spoke of the romance of the camp fires, of bold songs accompanied by guitar and accordion, she spoke of the naïve enthusiasm in her son’s face in the glow of the flames, of her unease when she saw his new “comrades” strutting around with their weapons, Like children playing cops and robbers, she said.

  Lisa listened in silence. She heard the flag flapping on the roof of Café Seetempel, she heard the swoosh of the sea and the voices of the other summer guests, the shrieks of the children playing in the waves below, and the voice of her grandmother, who would never again be her grandmother. She saw the face of a stranger who was more familiar to her than any other person on earth. She listened to the story of Gunzhausen reception center in Bavaria, where the ethnic Germans were crammed into huge shower rooms for the purpose of disinfection, while blonde S.S. women “deloused” their clothes and possessions with Zyklon, I didn’t even know what that meant, Frau Kramer said and attempted a laugh, but without success. She spoke of the huge gymnasium where for months they waited for a notification until they realized that the S.S. were making them wait on purpose to reinforce their prominence over the Wehrmacht, which was not allowed to enlist ethnic Germans if they did not hold German passports. And then she told Lisa about how the children left them, Maria simply vanished, one day she went off with a young S.S. lad who had been transferred to Berlin. Karl, who she barely saw anymore because he drilled, played music and drank with his new friends, came to see them a few days later and announced, Mum, Dad, I’m joining the S.S., I’ve thought it through carefully, it’s my path, I can feel it.

  “When everything had been taken from us they let us go. They put us on a train, the train went via Prague and then on to Poland, which was now called the Wartheland.” She spoke of the Popkos from northern Bukovina, a real family—father, mother, five children, all the grandparents, a great-grandmother, They occupied three compartments, and in another sat the two of us, William and I, with no longer any idea why we were going to the Wartheland. She spoke of their arrival at Posen station, of the lanky S.S. man who tossed their things into a lorry and drove them out of the city and across the fields to their farm. She said, The Polish family’s breakfast was still on the table, the Polish family’s clothes were still in the wardrobe, and coming from the stable was the bellowing of two cows that hadn’t been milked that morning. She said, We stripped the beds, we washed the crockery and cutlery, we barely dared ask the question: What have they done with the owners? And then the pastor came across the fields on his motorcycle, he drove up with a
loud roar, took off his helmet and glasses, a tall man with a narrow face, I’ve forgotten his name, he did tell us when he got off and shook our hands, I recall the scene very well, but for the life of me I can’t remember his first words. He came in, said nothing about the owners and showed us round the farm, which we had familiarized ourselves with, and at the end he took us down into the cellar and said, much too loudly, If you ever need anything, come and see me. I’ll write down my address for you. And so he wrote down his address, talking much too loudly all the while. We were quite shocked, What an odd fellow, my Wilhelm said. But we understood him better two days later when we had Adam Herschel standing in front of us, his hands raised as if we’d pointed a gun at him.”

  “Who was he?” Lisa asked. It was the first thing she had said in a long while.

  Frau Kramer sighed, for she was getting ever closer to the most difficult subject of all.

  “He was a Jew, hiding from the S.S.”

  And so Frau Kramer had to tell Lisa everything after all; Gura Humora had given her only a little respite.

  “What did the S.S. do with the Jews?”

  “I don’t know exactly, my child. But it wasn’t good. They took them, transported them far away. When our train passed through Prague we saw a goods train full of people. One of the Popko men said, ‘Jews,’ nothing more, just ‘Jews.’ But all of us knew that something awful was happening.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “Your mother was a very beautiful woman, Lisa! It’s such a pity I don’t have a photograph to show you. One day, when Herschel had gone, the pastor came and implored us to help out again. My husband said nothing, it was soon after we’d learned of Karl’s death. Both of us were very sad and angry at the S.S., which had sent our son to his doom. Nor was the farm what they had promised us. The soil was poor and we had to work hard for our yields. I knew Wilhelm wanted us to keep ourselves to ourselves, but when I heard it was a woman who was pregnant I couldn’t help myself. Margarita had shot a German, the pastor told us, and because of her the governor of Konin, Obersturmbannführer Josef Ranzner, had executed thirty-seven Polish citizens beside the church, right where your mother had shot the German, Sturmbannführer Treitz. But of course it wasn’t her fault, she’d only wanted revenge for the death of her brother Tadeusz and your father.” She paused and took a deep breath.