Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  I take a deep breath, turn the handle, and walk inside his office.

  The rabbi sits behind his desk, dressed in a gray suit. He is an older man with a thick graying beard, not so dissimilar looking to Ezra Rosenstein, only a bit thinner. Though the immediate, obvious difference between him and Ezra is the black yarmulke crushing the rabbi’s silver-tinged curls. The nameplate on the front of his desk reads Rabbi Epstein.

  “Can I help you?” he asks, looking up from his desk, raising his silvery eyebrows a little. I don’t say anything for a moment. I want to speak, but I can’t. I clutch tightly to the flyers, leaving sweaty fingerprints across the back of them. “Can I help you?” he repeats.

  I clear my throat, but still no words will come. Suddenly I am a mute, my voice stolen, the way everything else has been. I hand the flyers to him across his desk. He picks up a pair of reading glasses, places them on the bridge of his nose, and holds the flyers out a bit in front of him. “‘Join group litigation against Robertson’s Finery . . .’” he reads out loud, and then mumbles the rest to himself.

  He looks at the flyer, then back at me, then at the flyer again. “Do you want to have a seat?” he asks, pointing to the chair across from his desk. I shake my head.

  “I won’t stay long,” I finally say, the words escaping me, almost against my will. I force myself to breathe. Breathe. Breath is harder than you think, when you are trying, when you are thinking about the motion of your lungs, in and out and in and out.

  “You want me to distribute these?” he asks me, letting the flyers drop to his desk.

  I nod, and somehow I explain to him about Joshua, about the lawsuit, about Bryda Korzynski. “She is missing a finger,” I hear myself saying, as if that means something. It does, though what I’m not sure. But I tell him this anyway, and he listens carefully.

  Rabbi Epstein listens the way a rabbi should. He nods his head, and he lets me talk. When I finish speaking he looks at the flyer again, creasing his brow in concentration so similar to the way Joshua always does. He pulls on the bottom of his beard a bit, just like Ezra. “And you are involved, in this case?”

  I shake my head. “I am just a secretary, for the lawyer,” I say. “I am just a messenger.” You cannot shoot the messenger, can you? Especially one cloaked so deeply in her second skin that her Jewishness has all but evaporated; this place is foreign to her.

  He nods. Maybe he believes me. Maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know if he cares. “I will hand these out on Saturday,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say, and I open my mouth as if to say something else, but then I don’t.

  “There is more?” he asks, looking at me. His eyes are brown, like almonds, like my sister’s eyes, though not quite, because they are lacking the small green flecks hers had. They do not look through me, like Bryda’s did, but they look at me with the kind of shrill intensity that makes me want to tell him more.

  I had a sister, I suddenly want to say. I love her. I miss her. I writhe with guilt. You might have heard of her. She was a Jew, and now she is famous for it. I was a Jew once too.

  But what I say is this:

  “I have a question.” I’m not even sure why or how these words escape my lips, except they do, and before I can stop myself, I am asking him, “What would happen to a Jew who pretends not to be a Jew?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “What would happen?”

  I nod.

  “Well, this is America in 1959. Not Germany during the war. The Nazis are gone now.”

  Are they? Are they ever gone? I think about what Bryda said, that her boss, he is a Nazi. And I think about that gang of hoodlums beating up Jewish children, the swastikas still drawn on synagogues. The firebomb. At the thought, I feel myself sweating. I nod at the rabbi and move toward the door; my instinct to run is back.

  “Miss,” the rabbi calls after me, and I stop and turn and look at him again. “God knows,” he says. “You can’t hide from God.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I KNOW THAT I SHOULD EAT DINNER, LATER, WHEN I AM BACK at my apartment and the skies are dark. I know that I should. That I should be hungry and want and enjoy food as I must have once, as a girl on the Merwedeplein. I am certain I did. Mother’s chicken soup. I feel I craved it once, before the war. The scent of dill and carrots and chicken fat stewing for hours on the stove. Only now I can barely remember what it is like to enjoy the taste of something. Most of the time I eat because I know I have to.

  I am still thinking about the rabbi’s words, that God knows who is a Jew and who is not. If that is true, then does He also know what happened with my sister, what I did? I shake my head, because I am not sure that I believe that God knows anything anymore.

  But I think about Eduard’s words as we’d stood together by the destroyed Judischausen: You are who you are.

  Oh, Eduard. If only it were that simple now.

  I don’t think Eduard knew about the publication of my sister’s book before he died, and he certainly never knew what my American life would become, how really, truly, deeply I would continue to hide myself.

  You are who you are, Eduard said.

  I was hiding that day when I showed up at his doorstep after the war. I was dressed in a nun’s habit, Brigitta’s idea—just in case.

  “Yes, Sister?” he’d said, staring at me then. Eduard was tall and handsome, with thick black hair, and he seemed unchanged by the war, except for the streaks of silver dancing just around the edges of his ears. “Can I help you?”

  I remembered the habit, and I shook my head. “I am not a sister,” I whispered, the words catching in my throat. For a moment I could not breathe. “I am Edith’s daughter,” I finally managed to say, and I was surprised by how small my own voice sounded.

  His green eyes curled in confusion, then, all at once, recognition. “Edith Hollander?” he said, referring to Mother by her maiden name. I nodded.

  “Annelies?” he asked first. I shook my head and told him my name. He raised his eyebrows, and I thought, My sister. She always was the memorable one.

  “You can stay here,” Eduard told me, after I told him about the Red Cross lists, the rest of my family. Eduard placed a large hand on the protruding bone that had once been my shoulder. His green eyes, they were rivers. “Really,” he said. “This can be your home. For as long as you like.”

  I stayed for nearly six years. While Eduard was at work during the day, I read my way through the volumes that filled his library: mostly literature, written in English. The only German books were the classics, which were the only German books we’d allowed ourselves in the annex too. And I understood, for Eduard, who was not a Jew, that maybe this was his small act of rebellion. I spent afternoons in the sunlight and privacy of his backyard rose garden, perfecting my English, sometimes reading the English words aloud, practicing them in my voice. In the evenings Eduard ate a hearty supper, prepared by his housekeeper, while I would take a few bites. Like Ilsa, he urged me to eat more, but I could not.

  Sometimes I miss the simplicity of those days, the quietness of Eduard’s house in Frankfurt, before I came to the United States, before the book, before the sweater. You are who you are, Eduard said. Yes, living there with him, for that time, I was.

  The phone rings, and I jump. I am on the couch, stroking Katze, and I think it cannot be a member of the Beth Shalom congregation. Already. But of course, it is not. It is Ilsa again.

  “My dear,” she says, when I pick up, “you’re not in the middle of eating, are you?”

  “No,” I lie. “I’ve already finished.”

  She hesitates for a moment, and then she says, “You have been eating well, haven’t you?”

  “Of course,” I lie again.

  “Well, anyway, I just wanted to check up on you, see how things have been going this week.”

  “Fine,” I say, forcing the word from my lips in my perfect imi
tation of cheeriness.

  She hesitates for a moment. “Are you sure?” she says. “Because I have just had a feeling that something isn’t right with you.”

  “Oh, Ilsa.” I force myself to laugh and fight the image of Rabbi Epstein’s face, staring, staring, staring at me. Eduard’s strong voice, echoing in my head. You are who you are. “You really do worry too much.” I imagine Mother or my sister, if they were here. They too would say: I can hear it in your voice. Something isn’t right. Stop being such a ninny. Stop lying to us, Margola.

  But Ilsa chuckles, and I picture her on the other end of the line, sitting in her country kitchen, tugging on her earlobe. “Bertie says I am a mother hen. And that I annoy you.” She pauses. “But it’s just, you know if you ever need anything. Anything at all, my dear.”

  “I know,” I tell her, and this much I do know. “Thank you.”

  “Did you decide on your car yet?”

  “My car?” I ask, not at all sure what she means at first.

  “Your pink Cadillac?”

  “Oh,” I say, “that. No, not yet.” I close my eyes, and I can see it again, in the drive at 2217. I have been too chicken to go back there again, too afraid of what and whom I might find. And besides, I have been consumed with Joshua and Penny, and this case. This case. The rabbi. God knows.

  “Oh,” Ilsa says, “my dear, we have been thinking more about our trip, and we think we might like to do a whole tour of Europe.”

  “How nice,” I murmur.

  “Bertie is going to call an agent to book us a package. Germany, France, Switzerland—”

  “Switzerland?” I ask, and it is a word that barely forms in my throat before it wants to choke me there.

  “Yes, I have always wanted to see the Alps, my dear.”

  “The Alps,” I say. “Yes, of course.”

  “You will come with us, won’t you, my dear?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say slowly, trying not to let on to Ilsa that it is very hard for me now to breathe.

  “Well, at least give it some thought. I’m not going to let you off the hook that easily. I’d really love for you to come. Bertie and I both would.”

  Long after my phone call with Ilsa is finished, I find myself lying in bed, wide-awake, thinking again of the letter I have never written. Switzerland, I think. My father.

  Not only is he editor of my sister’s famous book, but also now he is husband to a woman named Fritzi Markovits. He is owner of a new life, lover of a new woman, holder of an indelible legacy.

  Sometimes I imagine what might happen should I even find myself standing on his doorstep, ringing his bell.

  I would not be disguised then in a nun’s habit, my hair short and shorn, my flesh falling across my bones. Now I am still thinner than I was before the war, older, but all in all, I look very much the same girl who hid there on the Prinsengracht.

  But even if I went to Switzerland now, found him now, even if he opened the door and his eyes shone with recognition, I know the first things he would ask me: how did I get away from the Nazis, and why did I stay hidden so long. And then, he would turn his brown eyes toward me, ripe with disappointment, or even disgust.

  Where is your sister? How could you come back here without your sister?

  If I made it past that, and I was still breathing, then I might say, Where is my diary? Why is my sister’s book, filled with stories, the one the world knows? Why have you always loved her more than me, even in death? But, most likely, I would not say any of this. I would only stare at him, loving him and feeling angry with him. Wanting to hug him tightly to me and wanting to run.

  Who is it? Fritzi might call from somewhere behind him, inside the house. Who’s at the door, Otto?

  No one, dear, he would answer her.

  Then he would shake his head, and he would whisper to me, You killed her. And I am the one keeping her alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  EARLY FRIDAY MORNING BEFORE SHELBY HAS ARRIVED, Joshua buzzes me into his office. I wonder if he has come to work today just to talk to me, and the thought thrills me a little. “Well,” he says, motioning me to have a seat. “How did it go with the rabbi?”

  I hear Rabbi Epstein’s words in my head again about God knowing who is a Jew and who is not, but Joshua, he does not. He has no idea. “Fine,” I tell Joshua. “Rabbi Epstein will pass out the flyers tomorrow at the services.”

  “All right,” Joshua says, smiling at me. “Very good, Margie. Let’s see if you get some more calls next week, and we’ll go from there.” He pauses. “Mr. Bakerfield is coming in at ten, and then I’m off to Margate for the weekend. Hold all my calls, and leave the messages on my desk. Send Mr. Bakerfield back when he arrives.”

  “Of course,” I say, standing, walking to the door. “Anything else, Mr. Rosenstein?” I want him to say there is, that there is something. What, I’m not sure. But something.

  But all he says is this: “That’ll be all for now, Margie.”

  At precisely 10 A.M., Charles Bakerfield steps off the elevator. He tips his hat, nods in my direction. “You can go ahead back,” I tell him. “Mr. Rosenstein is expecting you.”

  He stares at me for another moment. Then he smiles and walks into Joshua’s office and shuts the door behind him.

  “Now, that one,” Shelby whispers across the desks, “gives me the willies.” I do not really know the details of Charles Bakerfield’s case, except what I have gleaned from typing some of Joshua’s notes and from what I recall from reading the stories in the Inquirer last year, after it happened. His wife was found strangled in her bed, but according to Joshua’s notes, Charles claims it was an accident. “What a creeper,” Shelby says.

  “Shhh,” I whisper to Shelby now. “He might hear you.”

  She shrugs. “What’s he going to do?” she asks. “Kill me?”

  It is such an American thing, to talk of death as if they are so far from its reach. Perhaps it is their inability to understand that murder, it is easy for some people. These people, they will kill, and they will kill again, and it will mean nothing.

  I was familiar with trials, even before I came to America and began working for Joshua. In Frankfurt, Eduard and I, we’d sit on the sofa in his parlor drinking tea and listening to the voices stretching out on his radio, recounting the events. In Nuremberg, in Luneberg, in Kraków, in Hamburg. The men, the Nazis, they were found guilty, and condemned to die by hanging. I wanted to watch them hang, watch them struggle to breathe, with the ropes tightening around their necks. But even if I could have, Eduard never would have let me.

  After a while he would switch the radio off. “This isn’t healthy, Margot,” he would say to me. And my ears would yearn for more, for something. I’d have to bite back the urge to push Eduard away, to turn the radio back on. But Eduard was filled with kindness, and I never wanted to do anything that might cause him sorrow.

  Sometimes when he was at work, though, I would come in from the garden and switch the radio on and listen without him. Sometimes, if I moved the antenna just right, I could get the American station and then I would listen to the smooth voice of Mr. Walter Cronkite recounting the events of the day. He was the one who told me that the men, the Nazis, in Nuremberg, they were to be hanged. Eduard told me too, later that same day. But Walter Cronkite, of course, said it better, with just the right amount of anger, defiance, and disgust. In Eduard’s voice, I heard only sadness.

  “There will be some justice,” Eduard told me, but I did not think he really believed it, that any justice could actually be served.

  I shook my head. “Hanging a few Nazis is nothing,” I said.

  “Margot,” Eduard said again. “Turn the radio off. It’s not healthy.”

  There was controversy after Nuremberg over whether the ropes used to hang the Nazis were too long on purpose. If the ropes were too long, Walter Cronkite reported, it me
ant the men struggled and died slow and painful deaths, whereas if the ropes were shorter, their necks would’ve snapped immediately, quickly.

  The executioner denied the claims, saying the ropes were just the right length. But I suspected he was lying, and that was something for which I was glad.

  I know Charles Bakerfield, he is not a Nazi. But still, I agree with Shelby that he is, as she calls him, a creeper. Most likely, he is also a murderer, and it pains me that if he is set free, if he is not to be hanged for his crimes, that it will be Joshua’s doing. That Joshua is the one who will help him get away with murder.

  Charles Bakerfield walks out of Joshua’s office just before lunchtime. He tips his hat at me and holds his wild green eyes on my face for maybe a moment too long. “Have a nice weekend,” he says to me, smiling wide enough to reveal a golden tooth on the right side of his mouth.

  Shelby is on the phone, but she shakes her head at me after the elevator doors shut. I shrug and continue with my typing, glancing out of the corner of my eye through the glass window as Joshua readies his desk and gathers his things for the weekend.

  He walks out of his office and stops in front of my desk. I look up and he smiles at me, gray-green eyes dancing. “Well, I’m off to Margate,” he says.

  I nod, because he has already told me this earlier, and it feels like there is something else he wants to say but maybe not in front of Shelby.

  “Have a nice time,” I tell him. “Enjoy the sea.”

  He smiles again, and his face softens. “Have you ever been there, Margie?”

  “To the sea?” I ask, and I am suddenly filled with sadness as I think of Peter’s eyes, the way they held me, on the divan.

  “No.” He laughs. “To Margate.”

  “No,” I say. “I have never been to the New Jersey sea.”