What remained instead, Google informed me, was something called Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones. These were small memorial stones embedded in the streets of Salzburg and other cities, in apparently random places. Yet after a comprehensive tour of the small city, I had not come across even one. When I stopped to ask two young girls who were DJing in a public square to help me find them, they looked at me with extreme confusion and said they had never heard of such a thing. I explained myself more clearly in German, insisting that the stones had to exist. Perhaps they might know where I could get a map of them? Now they were annoyed. “They are here, but hard to find. Maybe in that street up there to the right. But we don’t know.”
There were no stones to be found in that street up to the right, even though I scoured the narrow alley at least five times, eyes glued to the cobblestones. In another square, young men and women in white garb were performing a traditional Austrian folk dance, and a crowd had gathered. I retreated to my cheap hotel on the outskirts of the old quarter to grab my suitcase, and as I arrived at the eerily silent triangular intersection, I paused suddenly before crossing the street to my hotel, for I had been held up by something that resembled a flashback.
Only it wasn’t my memory. It couldn’t be, because the image of myself I had in my mind now, in a frilly pinafore, with two long braids tied with ribbons, being swept up a street just like this one by a middle-aged woman wearing long skirts and a tilted hat, her waist cinched by some invisible contraption, to visit an old woman on her deathbed—this wasn’t even of my time. It was as if I was remembering something a hundred years past, in a city I had never visited, among architecture I had never glimpsed before, seeing the faces of family members I did not recognize. I stood transfixed at that street corner, staring at the building in question that had conjured this strange vision, an old apartment house painted the palest shade of lilac with white trim, its windows darkened and motionless. Why was I being assaulted with these strange, otherworldly déjà vu moments now? Was this a memory that I had inherited, or had I invented it, patched together an amalgam of my grandmother’s stories? Had they fermented in me all these years? Did they now rise to the surface as if to be expurgated, the way I had watched my grandmother skim the fat off the chicken soup? I shook now on this warm summer day as if from a deep chill, and I hurried all the way to the train station, even though I was in no rush, because I felt as if there were specters in this town I needed to shake off. If I stayed a moment longer, I thought, they would attach themselves to me like dybbuks.
* * *
• • •
I got on an ÖBB train heading west, but I couldn’t figure out if Munich was the train’s last stop or if the train continued beyond my destination. Because the stops were not announced in advance, I had to be ready to disembark at any moment, as the doors remained open for only a minute or two before the train moved on. As we pulled into each station I would check the monitor screen and look at the platform signs to gauge where I was. At one point, I looked up to see the words “München Hauptbahnhof” on the screen and raced to the door before it closed. The conductor, a thin, older man with a fluffy white mustache that obscured his mouth, was just about to lock up.
“Munich?” I asked.
“Ja, Munich,” he said and urged me off through the half-open door.
Only when I had descended did I realize that the platform sign read rosenheim. I quickly turned back, trying to reboard the train, exclaiming to the conductor that this was the wrong stop, but he simply shrugged as he looked me in the eye and slammed the train door in my face.
It was as if I had just witnessed an act of unspeakable cruelty. My chest contracted, my lungs burst; my breath came out with a fit of tears, and I collapsed onto my little pile of luggage on the platform. In the distance I could vaguely glimpse, through the grayish film, a line of people at the other end of the station, watching me silently.
When I finally arrived at Munich Central Station, having found a local train at the other end of the Rosenheim station, it was pouring rain outside, and I went to the station bar, where I ordered a coffee in German. The bartender asked where I was from; she said my accent was süß, sweet. And because I was only just beginning to navigate this strange language that was both comfortingly familiar and threateningly distorted at the same time, because I heard the German word süß as the Yiddish ziß, I didn’t know if I should take it as a compliment or condescension, but I was at the very least glad to see my origins were not quite clear.
“Why don’t you guess?” I asked.
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” she said. “Usually, I can tell right away, but your accent is a mixture of many places. Czech? Polish? Swiss? Maybe the Netherlands?”
I smiled into my cup. She was fixating on my strong ch sound in ich. “A mixture,” I answered.
Two very drunk men proposed marriage to me as I ate at three o’clock in the afternoon. They stood too close to me, their beers sloshing in their glasses.
Onlookers told me not to be concerned, that this was Bavarian culture. “We are very friendly,” one guy said while gripping my hand tightly. I extricated my hand and tried to excuse myself from the bar.
It was Markus who rescued me then, interceding among the drunks and settling himself protectively on the bar stool next to mine. Tall, broad, German-looking in all respects, but with a crooked slant to his nose that made him more personable, and a perpetual half smile of amusement that alleviated the severity of his angular features, he loomed suddenly on the horizon of my vision, blocking everything else out, and it was as if someone had passed a cooling hand over my brow—now I had only to concentrate on this focal point directly in front of me, and all the foreign and frightening layers that lay in wait behind him could recede into irrelevance for the time being. We exchanged pleasantries and I could see he was sober and decent. He complimented my thick-framed glasses and told me, in an almost wondrous tone, that I looked as if I had fallen out of a Woody Allen movie. I forgave him the cliché this once in light of the circumstances, and soon the conversation migrated to more interesting topics. I told him about how I had planned to retrace my grandmother’s steps through Europe, and that Germany was the inevitable last stop on my route. I waited for him to get defensive or turned off by the topic, but he responded with serene curiosity. He told me, with a face as straight as was possible despite that implacable half smile, that he was descended from Mennonites on one side but Nazis on the other. His grandmother had even boasted about kissing Hitler’s hand, he said, as if daring me to be shocked.
I paused, looking at him searchingly. The moment felt like a portentous opportunity; the first conversation I had ever had with a German-speaking man who did not retreat into denials or talk about a grandfather in the resistance. It seemed to me that Markus felt removed enough from the past to experience little pain as a result of addressing it, and I was immediately aflame with curiosity as to why.
“It’s not so much about what your grandparents did,” I said to him thoughtfully, “or about what any of our grandparents did, but about what you yourself would have done if you had lived back then. Can I feel sure that you wouldn’t have gotten swept up in that craziness and killed someone like me?”
“Can you be sure that you wouldn’t have killed me, if you had been the German and I had been the Jew? Can you ever really be sure of anyone until you see them in those circumstances?”
“I’m not capable of that kind of hatred or violence.”
“What if you had been raised by avowed anti-Semites? Who, then, is really in full possession of themselves?” His eyes sparkled. It was clear it was all theoretical for him; he was enjoying the philosophical aspect of our conversation. I marveled at his detachment.
“Did you know that Judaism actually believes in the precept of visiting the sins of the father upon the son?” I responded. “I grew up knowing that our suffering was an atonement for the Haskalah,
the Jewish Enlightenment. But in the same way, I was taught that the Germans will always be judged as evil for what their ancestors did. We would have to hate them forever.”
“But you’re not your upbringing anymore. You’re you.” His smile was still there, patient and tranquil.
“What if I’m both? What if I can’t decide?”
None of my brief romantic encounters until that moment had been characterized by this intense, raw intimacy. When Markus offered to join me for the next leg of my journey, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked him, out of a sense of duty. “We may end up hating each other.”
“I’ll take that chance,” he said.
He went out into the rain to get his car, and I waited for him by the entrance. Across the stairs, a group of youths dressed in black, with tattoos on their necks, smoked cigarettes with idle, dismissive expressions. How is it that you tell apart a Nazi and a punk again? What did a skinhead look like anyway? Every face seemed menacing, and I felt more and more skittish as the minutes ticked by. A random set of eyes met mine coolly, and I cringed and looked at the floor. A tall man smoked a cigarette a little too close to me, and I felt my heart rate speed up. Was I imagining his leer?
Finally, my phone vibrated. “Come around the corner,” Markus texted. “I’m parked outside of the Starbucks.”
I didn’t want to go back into the crowd. “Can you meet me at the exit?” I asked. “I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed.”
He did. I looked up and there he was, massive without being threatening, his impish smile never once subsiding. I still don’t know how to explain the feeling I had then, which I had never experienced before, of looking into a completely new face with the conviction that it was somehow supremely familiar to me. I looked at him and felt instantly as if I had known him always.
We argued over who would carry my suitcase in the rain.
“I’m a feminist. Let me do it myself!”
“Genau,” he said, “exactly. Be a good feminist and hold your tongue.”
We bantered like that all the way to his car, on the drive to the hotel I had booked, and in the supermarket we visited to buy groceries. We teased and argued and laughed, stopping only for necessary conversations with the cashier and the hotel receptionist. We couldn’t look away from each other’s eyes.
We ate hastily in the room, stuffing slabs of dark brown bread with creamy goat cheese into our mouths. We had been sitting on the edge of the bed, and inevitably we fell into it after the last crumb had been brushed off our laps. I remember not being able to contemplate doing anything else. I felt like I had conjured a golem of sorts, a lightning rod for my projections and complexes.
That story I had grown up with, the one I had believed for so long, that there was an entire nation of people on the other side of the Atlantic who still burned with hatred for me because I was Jewish . . . well, here was a pin in that balloon. The heat of his skin on mine, the smile in his eyes, his shy movements—these made him human in a way I never could have grasped intellectually. In those moments, no lines existed between us, racial, cultural, or emotional.
I had this sensation of a very old wound starting to close. Nerves tingled and came alive, muscles twitched and shuddered, and my whole body throbbed—it was as if two cliffsides struggled to move toward each other to bury the gap between them, but I feared that monumental quake would only serve to bring on an avalanche.
* * *
• • •
My original plan had been to trace the route my grandmother had taken from camp to camp after she had been selected at Auschwitz for forced labor, the first one, just north of Munich, then on to Saxony and Lower Saxony, until she was dumped at Bergen-Belsen when the enemy was getting too close. But now, in the presence of this man, a man who made me want to check into a hotel and not leave for two weeks, I realized I was tired of being sad, of being trapped in the past while everyone else got to live in the here and now, tired of this heavy allegiance that demanded every ounce of psychic energy I possessed, and I wanted nothing more than to just be human for a little while, to be just one person, divorced from all the baggage of my ancestors that I insisted on carrying with me. Perhaps there was a way to maintain my allegiance to this original goal simply by being here in any way at all, by confronting not what had been wiped out, but what had continued. And so I said to Markus, “Let’s not do any Holocaust stuff just yet,” and he smiled at me and said “Zum Befehl!” in that way that he had of employing irony with a straight face, so I never quite knew where he stood.
The next morning, I placed my bags in the trunk of his hatchback and instead of heading north we drove into the heart of Upper Bavaria. About an hour south of Munich, the Alps loomed into view, and we climbed the foothills in search of a place to stay. I knew nothing about the region except that it had been home to the Blue Rider movement, which Richard had educated me about, and I knew there would be many museums dedicated to the era that I could explore. We settled on a small bed-and-breakfast in the sleepy town of Murnau am Staffelsee, perched just at the foot of the mountains, with a sweeping view on all sides.
The owners of the bed-and-breakfast were a couple named Gina and Frederic; she was a painter and he was a cook, and together they had created something of an unusual retreat in homage to the history of the area, an inn filled with paintings and sculptures that also served sumptuous meals at the attached cantina. The property had numerous nooks and crannies to hide in, with an abundance of plants, trickling fountains, and cozy seats and hammocks suspended at various angles. A plump British shorthair cat was sunning himself in the driveway as we dragged our suitcases across the pebbles.
Markus went to pet him, crooning and cuddling the now purring cat with almost childlike enthusiasm. I watched with amusement as this large man bent over the tiny animal.
“Look,” Markus called to me where I stood with my case. “He’s rolling on his back to show his tummy, look how happy he is. Isn’t he the cutest?”
“That’s Max,” Gina called from the entrance. “He lives here. Let me show you to your room. I hope we’ll see you at dinner later?”
I nodded. I had read excellent reviews of the restaurant online on the way there. “We’re really looking forward to it.”
* * *
• • •
Our room was a charming alcove suite on the second floor, with a porch that faced west, where the sun was already setting behind the sloping tiled roof. Amber light striped across the bed and on the floor. It was as if we had found a place where time stopped and held its breath, just so we could discover each other in that sacred space between inhale and exhale, before we had a chance to think about how this would work when the moment inevitably came to an end and breathing resumed.
But first, we took a walk around the picturesque town. Outside the church, I saw an enormous memorial, cast from granite, with fresh roses and daisies laid at its base. It was titled Unsern Helden—To Our Heroes. It consisted of the names of local citizens who had died fighting for Nazi Germany.
“Can they do that? Can they turn them into heroes now?” I said.
“Not everyone wanted to fight in the army,” Markus said. “A lot of them were forced.”
“Don’t you think a more appropriate title for this memorial would be ‘Our Victims,’ or perhaps ‘Our Martyrs’? Heroes—don’t you see what that implies?”
He shrugged. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a young teenager with a blond buzz cut glance over at me surreptitiously. Had he understood what I had said? Was he a skinhead? I pointed him out to Markus.
“Don’t talk so loud, yeah?”
“But that’s the point! I should be nervous about talking about it, here, where it happened? Where supposedly there is the best Holocaust education in the world? Do you see any memorials here for the Jewish heroes who died?”<
br />
But there were none, not in that town, and not in any of the other small Bavarian towns we visited in the area. I did not bring it up again, but I decided that the absence of memory was a kind of denial. To avoid the issue was to pretend it had never happened, and in that sense Bavaria was similar to Austria—it had become convenient to forget, or rather to revise. It wasn’t fair to hold Markus responsible for that, but even though there were no lines drawn between us when we were alone in a room, outside it became easier to see him as on the other side of some great gulf.
At dinnertime we wandered over to the cantina, a lovely whitewashed grotto carved out of the property’s east side. Inside, it was already lively with the sounds of beer glasses clinking, dishes and cutlery being sorted in the back, and the vibrant chatter of diners. Every table was full, as the restaurant was open to the general public as well, but Gina spotted us. She approached us looking regal in a floor-length robe, her hair wrapped in a silk turban.
“Come outside,” she said. “I always keep a special table for the guests.”
We followed her out the back door into an enclosed yard full of rustling ferns, illuminated only by Christmas lights strung between the trees. Under a broad umbrella sat a lone table, its slatted wooden top draped in a white mantilla. Red roses floated in a bowl at its center. Three men already sat around the table drinking red wine from stemless glasses.
“A table for friends,” Gina said, smiling and nodding at the others. “Away from the noise. Here we can actually talk.”
Exodus, Revisited Page 21
