by Shira Nayman
The hallway, cold and wide after the confinement of the attic, was softly aglow with early-morning light. I stayed close to the wall as I took the stairs, ducking beneath the window at each of the three landings.
I descended the last flight to the maid’s quarters and turned the glass door handle with care. Hilde’s room was as she had left it—the crocheted bedspread drawn tightly across the bed, a half-drunk glass of water on the windowsill. Four stockings dangled from the mantle, each describing the shape of Hilde’s short thighs and muscular calves. An open book lay spine down on the table by the window, splattered with faded rose petals, and beside it, in a glass vase filled with murky green water, a half-dozen stems stood with drooping puckered heads. Hilde’s familiar odor lingered in the air, a curious mixture of molasses and slightly rancid milk.
Through Hilde’s room and into the adjoining workroom, used for storing wood, which opened onto the garden. Out and across the little vegetable garden Hilde had tilled for so many years, now dormant under a cover of sackcloth.
The gray stones of the alley collected my footsteps into echoes, which sounded dangerously loud. The leaves, the sky, the occasional crop-haired bullfinch—all were startlingly vivid, unnervingly still, as if everything around me was readying to pounce. I felt something brush up against my leg and started to run. I swiveled my head back to see a small white dog with a wounded expression on its face. I slowed back down, attempted a casual gait.
Walking. A welter of streets. I was aware of an alarming, invisible shift that had taken place in the world. I’d had no reason, before this moment, to question my place in the order of things as I walked down the street. But now, the world vibrated with awareness, bristled with the threat of being seen.
I found myself taking the familiar route to my school—I would have graduated with honors in the spring, only days shy of my eighteenth birthday, and therefore of the draft. I came to a halt before the building. Flashes of my life there: crouched on the tarmac of the schoolyard, shooting marbles, lining up when the bell rang to file into class. Always a crowd of boys in boisterous motion. It was here that the world of art and artifacts had been opened up for me, through the person of Professor Eisensdtadt, a junior curator from the Zwinger who taught several afternoons at the school. The darkened classroom, the procession of illuminated slides beamed onto the wall, the feel of slipping into a new dimension. Sometimes, in that brief moment before the lights flickered back on, I’d feel almost drunk, my imagination reeling with these images in their slow-motion brilliance.
More recent events at the school were bleached out and unreal, like overexposed photographs. There were the gradual disappearances—senior boys pulled out for the draft, the day they came of age—and the other empty chairs about which no one spoke, the age of the boys in those cases irrelevant. I had now joined them myself: one of the vanished. Were my friends alarmed? Agitating to find me? Or doing what we’d all done before: simply taking this latest disappearance in stride?
The building was locked; no one was yet about. I looked up at the curved inscription on top of the tall iron gates. Light pulsed behind the steel-gray fabric of the sky, turning it to a sheer funereal veil. Standing there before the school, I counted my own breaths, one through ten then back again. A flutter, inside, of recklessness. I turned in the direction of the city center. I wanted to put to the test that new feeling: to see whether there really were eyes everywhere—in the coats of the birds, in the street signs and buildings and lampposts.
By the time I reached the center, the streets were coming to life. Older men in heavy overcoats carried briefcases, purpose in their stride. Women hurried to their work; others walked, small children in tow. Everywhere, the brown uniforms. They’d been around, it seemed, forever—since I was a boy of eleven. Now I felt I was really seeing them for the first time.
I walked purposefully, flexing my shoulders and the muscles of my back to ease out any possible sign of fear.
Up this street, down that, drawing in the bracing air: Heidelberg, my city, even as I fled it, tracing itself into the soles of my feet.
Before the department store, a small line of mostly younger women waited while a guard struggled with an unwieldy set of keys. It was risky, even crazy, but I was gripped by a desire to see if I could disguise the new knowledge I had about myself. When the large entrance doors finally opened, I followed the group of women into the foyer, with its minimal attempts at Christmas cheer—a bedraggled artificial Christmas tree, no more than three feet tall and missing handfuls of branches, and drapings here and there of tatty red tinsel and worn green felt.
I wandered around the ground floor; the oddment of salespeople and poorly stocked shelves contrived an atmosphere of grim deficiency. I stopped to examine a display of ties, frosted with fine dust. The unnerving sense, again, of watching eyes. I mounted the stairs, aware of the feel of my hand sliding slowly up the polished banister. Above and below me, on the two levels joined by the stairs, the number of shoppers seemed to be increasing. I was sweating beneath the multiple layers of clothing I was wearing. I reached the top of the staircase and there he was, a middle-aged man, paunchy, with a babyish round jaw, wearing a uniform. A presumptuous look on his face, eyes that had come to some conclusion.
Relax, relax, I said to myself over and over, desperately trying to appear indifferent.
“Over here, boy,” the guard said as I stepped onto the landing.
“Good day to you, sir,” I replied, intending to keep moving. I was stopped by the dangerous gleam in the man’s eye.
“Doing your Christmas shopping?” The guard’s voice was thick with derision.
“A vase for my mother, sir.” I looked him full in the face.
“I don’t see why your mother,” he emphasized this word, “would want to soil perfectly beautiful flowers with her filthy Jew hands.”
I looked at the man a long moment. The man stared back, seemed to be waiting.
“What do you want?” I asked, and the guard jerked his head in the direction of a booth on the other side of the mezzanine.
“Gestapo. Temporary office,” he said. “Let’s take a walk over there, shall we?” Just hardness, now, in his face.
“If it’s money …” my voice was steady.
Without hesitation: “What do you have?”
I named an amount of gold. Several emotions cycled transparently across the guard’s face: greed, anxiety, and, oddly, temperance.
“Wouldn’t want to clean you out, son,” he said, his tone now strangely avuncular. I unbuttoned my coat, reached in at the waist, pulled at Mama’s stitches, closed my hand around one of the gold coins she’d sewn in. I stretched my arm out, as if to shake hands. Our palms met.
“Holiday season, after all,” the guard said. I lowered my empty hand, nodded.
“Guten tag,” I said.
“Ja, and to you,” the guard replied with a trace of courtesy. I moved on, aware of a repugnant surge of gratitude toward the round-faced guard.
Out again on the street. I emptied my mind in order that my face might show nothing. My feet moved of their own accord.
Her filthy Jew hands. What had tipped off the guard? The extra layers of clothing? A furtive look in my face?
I rounded a corner and saw the sloping shapes of very old tombstones. Before me, in the small square, a circle of birds dipped and shook themselves in the froth of the fountain. The patina-green dome and steeple of the church rose prettily above the plain boxy roof of the vestry. Pausing beside the old graveyard, I peered at the largest of the markers, as I had done a hundred times since I was a boy, in an absent attempt to make out the faded lettering. Two letters only were decipherable, a D and an S, the others reduced to a bare indent or curve or else altogether dissolved into the stone.
I walked up the stairs to the church and rapped three times. The door was opened by the priest, whose face, with its bland watery eyes and loose, double chin, was as known to me as the faces of my own parents. Sunday
after Sunday, year after year, I’d sat on the smooth oak of the pew, taking in the week’s homily, glancing sidelong at the unmoving, absorbed forms of Mama and Papa, sometimes holding Else’s hand to keep her from fidgeting. The weathered, resigned face of the Pater presiding over us all, his kind, distracted eyes sweeping the congregation in a gesture of ingathering.
Now, standing in the doorway, the old Pater’s eyes flickered with surprise.
Inside, the familiar cold stone stillness of the air. I followed, the echo of several hundred years rising upward from my feet, up into the steeple’s point. The priest took me to the room behind the chapel, where the choirboys dressed for mass. Sitting across from him, on a low stool, I told him what had happened.
When I came to the part about my mother’s suspected Jewishness, I found myself hesitating. I felt absurd having to utter the words. The priest sat very still in his brown leather chair, his back to the heavy red drapes drawn across the window, his only movement an occasional nod of the head.
When I finished speaking, he leaned forward and gripped the arms of his chair with thick-knuckled fingers.
“There’s a milk cart that makes deliveries in the hills,” he said. “Twice a week. It leaves tomorrow morning. Six o’clock. We’ve sent Jewish boys out that way before. As far as I know, the escapes have been successful.” Barely noticeable, the slight indrawing of the Pater’s breath at the word Jewish.
“Alfred is the owner of the cart. He’ll tell you what to do once he drops you off. He has made a study of it. You will make your way by foot—far and away the safest bet—and eventually cross over to Marseilles. There, you will find a barge that sails for England.” Another pause. “Do you have money?”
I nodded, absently fingering one of the gold pieces my mother had sewn into the lining at the waist of my jacket.
“You’ll need it for the boat. A piece or two of gold will suffice. Now, about tonight. It’s not very comfortable, I’m afraid, but there’s a closet under the stairs behind the sanctuary where I keep my vestment garments. It would be best if you stayed there.”
It was stuffy that night, in among the priest’s garments, the long stifling hours measured out in lungfuls of mothballs and starch and stale body odor. The idea formed, and then I could not let it go, that I would make a detour in the early morning, en route to the market, to take one last, brief look at the river—my beloved Donau.
I slept very little, dozing off at intervals, for what seemed like only minutes. The airless closet had a skylight; I watched the night sky lighten to a misty, early dawn, then quietly took my leave through the silent cold church, moving one last time past the ancient wood door, tall as three men, the old metal hinges creaking quietly as I carefully pulled the door shut.
The backstreets were empty. I walked quickly—I could feel the exertion in my ankles, calves, thighs; the pavement rushed beneath my feet. And I felt I was moving in terrible slow motion. All around me, darkness diffused to grainy, hazed light. I broke out from the side streets to see the glimmer, ahead, of the river. Down by the water, where the brown grass thinned to a crust of dried clay, I crouched for a moment and closed my eyes, sensing the dark ache of the river’s passage through the hardening winter earth.
Looking at the rumpled green surface of the water, I puzzled over why, the night before, of all the benedictions I could have chosen, it was the Absolution I had asked the priest to recite.
Back on the side streets, hugging the shadows, I studied the universe of cracks at my feet as one might the constellations. Turning into the square, I saw that the market, like everything else, had narrowed to its own bare outline. Four or five ragamuffin stalls, each frayed awning flapping above a meager offering: several rounds of dark bread, charred at the edges; a trayful of gloomy-eyed fish; spotted apples in a barrel. The bread seller, no audience yet, barked to nobody, with the vaguely insulting gusto of the professional hawker. By the gate, a stooped man entreated an old mare laden with wares to get moving, but the beast only stared into the distance.
Alfred, the milk carrier, was exactly where the priest said he would be, in the far corner of the square, under the branches of a mulberry tree, busying himself with the hoof of his dray. He looked up at the sound of footsteps, lowered the animal’s leg. With no word and barely a glance, he opened the door in the house behind him and absently stood aside.
I found myself alone in a small hallway smelling of cat urine. Through the door behind me I could hear rhythmic, clanking thumps—the sound of the man loading the milk urns into the wagon. The door cracked open, I glimpsed the man’s eyes, bright and eager as a boy’s. He slipped in, then thrust me down the stairs.
Below, in the cellar, the man pointed to a grate high in the wall. “Five minutes. I’ll be there with the cart,” he said, and he was gone.
How to judge five minutes? Through the muddy darkness, across the cellar. The handle of the grate was stiff with rust. I tugged and it gave. I heaved myself into the opening, aware of the smell of fresh horse dung.
Two arms seized my shoulders; I was pulled out through the window and shoved into the back of a closed wagon. The clanking sound from earlier continued, amplified. Milk urns were being loaded into the wagon all around me, and then on top of wooden planks inches from my head.
The horses let out several loud snorts as they heaved the cart into motion. A tune reached my ears, the same peasant ditty my nurse had sung to me as a child, whistled through the milkman’s teeth. I focused on my breathing and tried to lose myself in the jolting of the cart.
The steady loping movement. Vague, unsettling moments of sleep. The slow assault, in my gut, of hunger. Staring into the closed darkness.
The hours congealed; time became the long, cold, intensely uncomfortable jolting of the milk wagon, my ears deafened by the clanking, my spine and bent knees reduced to an intensity of numbness that sparked, every now and then, into pain. Many hours into my journey, I fell into a dead sleep. I awoke with a feeling of dread. Nothing but the cursed clanking all about me, the world a cacophony of metal making busy contact with metal.
An ear-splitting explosion. Soldiers’ boots. Voices, shouting in German. “Pig! Jew lover!” The wagon reeled, then crashed onto its side. A foaming white torrent poured through a vent in the crate; the cool rain washed over me, soaking my hair, trickling into the crevices of my clothes.
“Find the Jew! He’s hiding a Jew!”
And now Alfred’s voice, anxious and solicitous. I opened my lips; sweet cream seeped across my tongue. I held it in my mouth before swallowing.
The approach of more heavy boots. The door of the cart, partly in splinters, pried from its hinge. Urns heaved from the toppled cargo. Gunfire, more shouting. The roof of the wagon flew skyward, the urns opened, metal flowers in fitful bloom, sending pure white geysers into the night air. A crater appeared in the floor of the wagon; I tumbled through, thudding to a stop with my face against the wet ground.
Crawling, clinging to a ridge of dirt, I waited for the next, fatal explosion. But there was only an eerie creaking: the damaged axis of the earth, trying to right itself?
Inching along the ground for an eternity. The smell of mud turned slightly foul. I tumbled into a shallow ditch. With my hands, I began digging. The soil was soft and gave easily. I packed the mud high on the sides to form a lip, and waited. Images from the weeks in the attic with my sister and mother flooded my mind: snatches of our intermittent conversations. Odd new glimpses of each other, in that shuttered world, that existence shorn of daylight and daytime realities. The dream Mama told me about, a strange dream that had visited her throughout her childhood. I heard her voice again:
I have no memory of any of the nuns ever telling me this, but after they took your father away, the image of it kept coming to my mind.
A wide lawn late at night, I’m standing alone. It is very cold; I’m inadequately dressed. Looking at a large house on a hill. Below me, beautiful countryside I do not recognize: fields and orchards. A fo
rest in the distance. I’m shivering in my short-sleeved blouse. Two people come out from a clump of bushes: large, draped figures, moving quickly. Each holds a hand to her head to keep her winged headgear from flying away in the wind. They are nuns, older members of the convent, the only home I ever knew.
They hurry up the incline; one disappears behind the house while the other stands watch. The first reappears, carrying an enormous ladder. Together, they maneuver the ladder into position against a window of the third floor, and then the first woman climbs while the second steadies the ladder from below. She opens the window and squeezes through. Minutes pass.
Finally, the plump nun reappears at the window and makes her way down, supporting herself with one arm. In her other arm, she carries a bundle. Leaving the ladder where it is, the two women move quickly across the open lawn. The bundle is moving, wailing. In the dream, I know two facts: that it is a Jewish household the nuns have robbed, and that the baby one of them holds in her arms is me.
I remember something else: hearsay, rumors. About rogue nuns who stole Jewish babies from their beds. They thought they were saving souls.
Lying in the ditch, Mama’s dream image was as vivid as if I’d had the dream myself.
After they took your father away.
It was cold in the ditch, but there was give to the dirt; it was a comfortable place to rest. Night fell fitfully. And then, darkness all around, pressing down from the sky and up through the damp soil. I ground my face into the mud: the feel of crushed worms against my cheek; I can feel it still. And smell the milk, which had turned, a sour stench lifting from my trousers, clammy against my skin.
After I began my apprenticeship with Mr. Harcourt at the London brokerage house of Harcourt and Goode, I realized I could tell the future. It was a kind of double exposure—the events recorded in the newspaper superimposed on the numbers flying off the ticker tape. Together, they formed a crystal ball; I had only to glance at it and it was as if I knew which stocks would rise: which business initiative was certain to thrive in that climate of war.
