A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  His face darkened. I knew I was intruding, but I could not stop myself.

  “Where are they? What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know, Marilyn. That’s the thing. I’m trying to find out.” Oscar gestured to the papers arranged in neat piles on the desk.

  “The man who’s been following us all around, does he have anything to do with this?”

  Now Oscar looked like the wind had gone out of him, as though he’d been kicked in the gut. “What man?” He seemed unconvinced by his own feigning.

  “Your late-night visitor.”

  Oscar reached into the drawer of his desk and drew out his tobacco pouch. “Have you spoken to him?” he asked calmly.

  “No. Well, yes. Not really.”

  Oscar looked at me inquiringly and waited.

  “Just once. About two weeks ago. I saw him sneaking out the back entrance. I asked him what he wanted. He looked at me rather arrogantly, I thought. He didn’t answer my question, needless to say.” The rest I left out—the business card he’d given me, and later, the dreadful telephone call.

  Oscar carefully filled his pipe. I could see he was waiting for me to say more.

  “I came by your office one night. To talk. Oscar, I heard you speaking German. At least I think it was you. It was hard to tell.”

  I saw it now, for the first time. Something beneath Oscar’s extraordinary control. Sensed that he was embroiled in an ongoing struggle to appear calm, against great odds—battling always, and with great effort, a mighty, invisible storm.

  “What is it he wants?”

  And then Oscar’s control slipped: only for an instant, but I saw again that rawness I’d glimpsed in the studio the night I’d showed him my desperate pictures of Erla; for a moment I felt I was looking at someone I’d never met—not Oscar at all, but a stranger, inhabiting his flesh.

  I looked away. When I cast my glance back, Oscar was restored. He picked up a match, touched the flame to the bowl of his pipe. As he puffed to get it going, he seemed to be measuring his words.

  “Things are seldom as they seem. I know you know this; I’ve seen it in your photographs.”

  Oscar could not have known the impact of his words. The image reared up, the boy in the green jacket, little poisonous flecks of soot, almost invisible, dancing about him in the air. I spoke without thinking.

  “Sometimes things are what they seem. Isn’t that what you intended to create here, at Ellis Park? Nothing but pleasure and calm and grace?” I hardly knew what I was saying. “Only superficial people don’t judge by appearances—isn’t that so?” I continued, a tremor in my voice, throwing back at him a line from Oscar Wilde that he liked to quote.

  I’d spoken about Ellis Park but, in fact, I was thinking of what I had done—saw, in that moment, the true nature of my own actions, though I suppose in some sense, I’d known it all along. This was my crime: showing Oscar the photographs that evening in the darkroom, the photographs of Erla. Showing the world the orphaned boy, there, before the rubble of his house. Ferreting it out, exposing.

  And now, here I was. No camera, it is true, but equally presumptuous. In a room bursting with secrets and pain.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, feeling the spill from my eyes. “Really, I am.”

  I rose, walked around the desk. Oscar rose too. Unthinkingly, we embraced: a long, slow embrace, Oscar still, utterly still.

  I knew, in that moment, that whatever the disconcerting man from the Office of Special Investigations might believe, Oscar could not possibly have committed the kind of crime to which he’d alluded. It was simply unimaginable.

  I drew away, averting my eyes, understanding only now, and too late, that it was not always my business to see.

  “He’s mistaken.” Oscar said this in an unfamiliar voice; I fancied I detected the trace of a German accent. “Whatever he told you—”

  “Yes?”

  Oscar had frozen; he was looking at me from some dark place. I’d been to dark places myself, but this was something else entirely. I took a step toward him; he held up his hand, keeping me at bay. Still, he said nothing. I stood unmoving; the heavy silence hung between us.

  “I’m tired.” Oscar seemed to be speaking to himself. “Terribly, terribly tired.”

  I remember every second of that meeting. It was the last time I lay eyes on Oscar.

  PART III

  Oscar

  The North Shore of Long Island. Summer, 1951.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Another witness apparently has surfaced. This brings the number to four. From what I can piece together, my visitor’s organization generally does not proceed unless a larger number can be produced. They have their reasons to be wary, I suppose, beyond an interest in justice: legal suits, libel claims, and the like. Who the witnesses are, how they came to light: on these issues, my visitor has remained silent. Not surprising, given the nature of the investigation and the fact that he is, for the most part, a man of few words.

  The one exception to his general taciturnity was on his first visit, when he talked at length about his organization, giving a detailed account of the dossier they had amassed pertaining, as he put it, to my “case.” When he came to the end of his monologue, I was speechless, so great was my astonishment. I detected a measure of embarrassment on his part at my reaction. I was standing by the window and it was only then, the two of us silently facing each other, I noticed the curtain behind me was not properly drawn. I quickly rose. On my approach, my visitor sidestepped me in the direction of the door, his green eyes cool. He flinched as I brushed past him. Before pulling the curtains to, I noted with some relief that the courtyard below and the wing opposite were in complete darkness.

  In subsequent meetings, my visitor has restricted himself to the fewest words necessary to convey the latest information. Once, he had nothing to communicate. When I asked him that evening about the purpose of his visit, seeing he had nothing to report, he replied that these briefings—that was the word he used—had been scheduled at prearranged intervals, that they did not depend on new developments.

  I am having trouble staring down the multiple horrors before me.

  I cannot bear to learn about my accusers or their circumstances. One thing I do know is their method of identifying me.

  Posing for that picture was a grim business. That first evening, my visitor was carrying a leather satchel, which he set down on the end table by the door. After his little speech, he removed from the satchel the most compact camera I have ever seen, and a tiny flash to go with it.

  “Over there,” he said, indicating an unadorned section of the wood paneling where I understood he wished me to stand.

  I walked to the spot, instinctively straightening my cravat, feeling like a fool for having done so.

  “It would probably be better to remove that,” he’d said, keeping his eyes on me while he fiddled with something on the camera.

  I untied my cravat and, not knowing what else to do with it, stuffed it into the pocket of my jacket. I looked straight into the camera. The miniature lens glinted at me before disappearing, along with everything else, in the tiny but potent light of the flash.

  It’s a wonder with all his comings and goings that no one has spotted my troublesome visitor. But then, he comes only very late at night and is, to his credit, a model of discretion.

  I can move quite freely around the town but I’ve been told not to leave the county. It did not occur to me that they would doubt my honor on this point until I noticed, three days ago, on my way to the bank, that a shiny blue car seemed unusually evident wherever I went. Once I made a point of looking out for it I found that the car, driven by a pleasant-looking middle-aged man, was trailing me in the most obvious manner as I went about my business. I have no intention of removing myself, although I suppose they can’t be blamed for thinking that I might.

  I must try to remain as unemotional as possible. I need to conserve my energy for the critical task at hand—of conducting
my search. Strangely, this unexpected and alarming development has renewed my vigor; whatever happens, I must do my utmost to track down my mother and my sister. I have uncovered several new leads and am pursuing them with all the hope of the early days, which I thought was lost to me forever. The rest of my life—the house, that is—continues to run smoothly.

  Now that I am reembarked on my search for Mama and Else, the memories are coming back unbidden. Almost six years of freedom, of having truly fled: undone. I find myself back in my childhood home, the redbrick house on Kirchstrasse. Back with my sister and mother, reliving the details, scouring each moment for clues as to how I might have—should have—acted differently. Seeing only, and everywhere, missteps.

  After the world performed that peculiar somersault that changed everything forever, I had wanted to ask my mother if Papa had known. I wanted to know if Papa had been as surprised as I was when the soldiers had come to our own door. For months we’d heard of the nighttime arrests—and, some weeks earlier, I’d heard my mother and father arguing about whether to hide our elderly neighbors, the Bergmans, in our attic.

  “Absolutely not,” Papa had insisted, his handsome face marred by the thick blue vein that appeared in his forehead when his ire was aroused. “We have the children to think of.”

  Mama’s response had puzzled me. “But it is the children I’m thinking of,” she said sadly, letting the lace curtain fall back across the window.

  Two weeks later, the Bergmans were taken away, with the usual theatrics. Clear across the street we heard the banging on the door, and then the sound of crashing and thudding from within—furniture being toppled, china and crystal smashed. The old woman must have been prepared: I knew that they did not allow people to collect belongings, and yet when she was led away, she was wearing her good felt hat. I pictured her, Mrs. Bergman, whom I’d known since my earliest days, sitting night after night in her parlor, the hat pinned into place on her head. I wondered what it could have meant to her, anticipating that when they led her away, she’d be wearing her good felt hat.

  They did not smash our door in, though, and they did not take us all away. Just Papa—For questioning, we were told. Your wife is suspected of being a Jew. It’s a crime to be married to a Jew. We need to establish the facts.

  I had long closed my eyes and ears to the awful realities of the new order—including the arcana of details surrounding the laws of racial purity—realities that had not, until now, pertained to me or my family. When they came for Papa, a vague and pertinent recollection seeped back. That while all Jews were considered racially impure, slated for eventual “resettlement” or “special work assignments,” to be married to a Jew was a crime, a treasonous act worthy of immediate action. This was partly a matter of public pageantry; such criminals were paraded through the streets wearing signs declaring their treachery. It dawned on me with horror that Papa would be put to such use. And, once the facts were established, we—my mother, Else, and I—would be put on the list for a late-night seizure.

  My father had not moved with the stunned stillness of the elderly neighbors but had gone in a panic, the blue vein writhing on his forehead. Papa gave us each a hasty kiss as the flax-haired soldier stood silently tending to his military posture. Some minutes later, I watched through the window as Papa descended the stairs. He cast a quick backward glance and I saw a terrible knowledge slammed into those gentle eyes, and something else I could scarcely believe: the strong, square jaw of my father, quivering.

  “Your father will be back,” Mama had said evenly, walking to the piano and raising the cover. “He’s only been taken for questioning. Their claim is absurd; they’ll find no records to back it up. They’ll admit their error and things will go back to the way there were.” She pressed a few chords into the keys, slowly, as if the care she took with the notes would ensure Papa’s safety. Else settled next to Mama on the brocade piano stool. Leaning over the belly of the instrument, I watched my mother’s wrists float above the keys.

  It was my idea to move to the attic.

  “I suppose it can’t hurt,” Mama had said. “As a precaution, until your father returns.”

  We dragged the cot from my room up the stairs. I see Mama in her tan wool dress, which kept catching in the springs of the metal frame. By the time we reached the attic, the front of the skirt was speckled with little brown holes. I managed the small table and chairs on my own; Else and Mama followed with armfuls of clothes. We brought up supplies in the wooden buckets Hilde used when she scrubbed the floors: bread, dried meats, sausage, jars of vegetables and preserves, three enormous cabbages with loose ruffled skin. I remember turning to see Else, a smaller dark-haired version of Mama, straining with the heavy buckets. In the dusky light of a single candle, I could see the grimness in Mama’s face. Pointless, after all, I remember thinking, to move to the attic. No matter how we barricaded it, the door to the attic would yield to the soldiers’ axes like butter.

  No records to back it up. I chewed over Mama’s words and found in them this meaning: that though not provable, the claim itself was true. But that evening, my mother’s face was closed to questions, so I resolved to wait out her mood and broach the matter in a day or two.

  Later, Else and Mama knelt by the bed, then looked toward me expectantly, though I did not join them; it had been years since I’d prayed. That smooth Latin chant, a layer of syrup to coat the dread. Mama made the sign of the cross over Else, then rose and did the same to me, her fingers curved like a dancer’s, pausing at my forehead, dipping to my chest, passing slowly across my shoulders. Her lips worked silently. I knew she was whispering to Jesus to protect her kinde.

  The needle flew in the wavery near-dark. A single taper, placed in the corner of the attic farthest from the window, was our only illumination. I’d never before seen my mother sew yet her movements were expert and unthinking. Where Mama was concerned, I was used to such little mysteries. Once—I couldn’t have been older than five—I was helping Mama in the rose garden. She’d turned and looked into my face, a sudden light transforming her features. The heaviness of the shears in my little boy’s hands; I’d managed to keep them aloft, just the right distance from the coiled bud.

  “I tended a garden like this when I was a little girl, just about your age.” The way she addressed me when we were alone: as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

  “The nuns planted it, just for me,” she continued, drawing so close I could feel the whisper of her breath on my cheeks. I exerted all of my strength to keep the shears up high against the stem, as if letting them fall would shred the splendid cocoon that had sprung up invisibly around us.

  “Before the convent,” I whispered. “Where did you live before you lived with the nuns?”

  “In a palace on a diamond mountain, where I took baths in tubfuls of rose petals.” She kissed my nose. The shears dropped from my hands, landing with a thud in the dirt. Mama turned back to her work, the brightness fading from her smooth oval face.

  She’d probably learned to sew in the convent; there, in the attic, I watched as Mama’s needle looped through the air. I glanced over to Else. It was then, when I saw my sister’s straight shoulders and closed, numb face, that I knew she would not be coming with me.

  “Here,” Else said, handing me a small scrap of paper. “My friend Klara, do you remember her? She has an uncle in England; his daughter and I wrote to each other for a while—pen pals, that’s what she called it. I kept her address. Take it.”

  The words were barely visible in the weak light. 47 Park Street, Mayfair. London. I folded it three times into a tiny square and handed it to my mother.

  The work done, Mama passed me the jacket. I examined the series of little pockets secreted in the lining at waist level, admiring the tiny, even stitches. I passed the jacket back to Mama, who slipped the gold coins, one by one, into the new pockets, tucked the tiny folded square of paper in with one of them, then set about stitching them shut.

  I did not s
leep. I sensed the arrival of morning, even before lifting a corner of the oily cloth covering the small window of the attic. Redbrick houses, side by side; a rusted bicycle leaning against a wall. Winter light slanted coldly across the gray length of the street, etching the shapes of naked branches onto rumpled patches of brown grass. I let the cloth fall, walked to where the wooden trunk, fastened with a brass latch in the shape of a lion’s head, sat under the eaves. I pulled up the protruding tongue of the lion and the trunk sprang open, releasing a musky, yellowish breath of cedar. Folded on top was the heavy navy jacket; beneath that, a blue woolen cardigan and navy flannel trousers. I removed each piece and put them on over the clothes I was already wearing. I glanced over to where my mother and sister lay sleeping on the mattress. I stood there, unmoving, for quite some time.

  So many conversations about leaving. Always the same, my mother’s tightly drawn mouth, her unshakable resolve. “I am not leaving without your father. He’ll expect me to be here when he comes back.” And Else’s girlish optimism: “It’s all a dreadful mistake. We’re Catholics, after all. Mama, isn’t that so?”

  I knew what they would say: “Go,” the two voices one. “We’ll see you when it’s over.”

  When I had finally summoned the courage to ask Mama about her background, she answered cryptically, though her meaning, in the end, had been plain.

  “I have no memory of any of the nuns ever telling me this story,” she’d said. “Although they must have, perhaps when I was a very little child. The image has been plaguing me since they took your father away. I always thought it was simply a very odd dream. It never occurred to me there was any truth in it.”

  I walked over to where Mama and Else lay sleeping. I leaned over my sister: the warm imprint of her cheek on my lips. Then I placed my own cheek against the face of my sleeping mother.