Margot

by Jillian Cantor

“Well,” he says, “it’s really something. You’ll have to go sometime.”

  He is just being nice, making conversation, I know that. But still, I can’t help but think it sounds almost like an invitation. “Yes,” I murmur. “Maybe sometime.”

  “See you Monday morning,” he says, tapping on the side of my desk, and then I watch him walk lightly to the elevator.

  “Don’t you just love it?” Shelby shakes her head after the elevator doors shut behind him. “Our bosses out on the beach while we’re stuck here.” She wags her forefinger across the desk at me. “We’re leaving early today, Margie, and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  She switches on her radio, and I hear the soft strains of “Lonely Boy” drifting across the desks. Suddenly it is as if Mr. Paul Anka, he is singing directly to me. “All I want is someone to love . . .” I think about Joshua leaving for Margate, where he will probably spend the weekend with Penny, again. And then I think about the pink Cadillac. What if it was a mistake? A visiting friend? Or Peter’s car? What if the American Pete wants to emulate Elvis Presley? Greatness is in bravery, Joshua said.

  “I’m actually going to leave right now,” I tell Shelby, and I stand up and gather my things to put into my satchel.

  She glances up from her typing and raises her eyebrows. “Well, Miss Franklin. Look who’s breaking the rules now.”

  “It’s only just a little early,” I say, though I glance at the clock and see it is not yet 11 A.M. I swallow back the thought that I am doing something wrong. Joshua is already off to Margate. Most likely with Penny. Any work I have left, I can finish up early Monday morning, before everyone else arrives at the office. Joshua will never know the difference. And even if he does, I’m not sure he will care.

  Shelby laughs, waves me toward the elevator, and goes back to her typing, so I know she’s not going to tell anyone.

  I walk out of the office building and toward the bus stop at the corners of Market and Seventeenth streets.

  I walk quickly, as I hear the sound of footsteps behind me. The gait of boots, heavy. I quicken my pace. The boots ache louder against the pavement. I am almost there, almost at the bus stop. And then there is a sound so loud it pierces my ears with its explosiveness. I jump. Gunshots. I close my eyes, and I picture Schmidt in his Nazi uniform, standing at the doorway to the train, his hand cocked on his gun. The shots echo in my ears, breaking them. “No,” I say. “No. No.”

  “Miss Franklin?”

  I turn to look behind me, and there is Charles Bakerfield. He smiles at me in a way that makes my skin turn cold even underneath my sweater. “Don’t be alarmed,” he says. “It was only a car backfiring.”

  A car backfiring. I breathe. In and out. In and out. His green eyes fix on my face; his gold tooth catches the sunlight.

  “Taking the bus somewhere?” He motions with his head toward the bus stop, just steps in front of me. I still cannot breathe. I try, but my lungs are too heavy to move. “I hate the city buses,” Charles says, shaking his head. “So dirty.” His green eyes wash across my face, as if he is examining me now, in a way that I have not felt in a long time, in a way that makes me feel an old horror. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” he asks.

  My chest, it is so heavy, but I manage to shake my head.

  “Are you sure?” Charles asks. “My car is right over here in the lot. It won’t backfire. I promise you.” He motions with his head toward the lot where I know Joshua parks, and I wonder if Joshua has left yet, if he is already in his car, driving toward Margate.

  I see the bus pulling toward the stop, and I exhale. “No thank you,” I say, and I stumble up the stairs of the bus, nearly falling with relief into the seat. Out the window, I can still see Charles standing there on the street, watching me, even as the bus begins to move away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  BY THE TIME THE BUS REACHES OLNEY AVENUE TEN MINUTES later, I have forced the image of Charles from my mind. I have escaped him now, ridden the bus toward something else that also fills me with fear. Now I am thinking about the image of the pink Cadillac resting in the drive at 2217.

  I get off the bus, but this time I do not walk like a spy. Instead I walk quickly, nearly breaking into a run to make my way to the 2000 block before I change my mind and run in the opposite direction toward home.

  Though I have been on this part of Olney Avenue before, now at the lunchtime hour, on a Friday, it feels different somehow. Just before noon, Olney is awake with children walking to and from school on their lunch hour. Roses have bloomed since I have been here last. I do not see them, but their scent is intoxicating, nearly overwhelmingly so, until I feel I might vomit.

  I reach my destination, and I stand there for a moment, in front of 2217, where the mailbox by the front door reads Pelt. There is only one car in the drive now, I notice, only the pink Cadillac. The black Volkswagen is gone. He’s at work, I think. And then, before I can decide to walk to the steps or turn and run, the crumbling green door swings open and I hear the sound of a woman’s voice.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” she is saying. “You don’t need to cry.”

  I listen carefully, and I believe it is the same voice I heard on the phone. My sister’s voice, what it might have become now, all these years later. The voice of a woman who is strong and smart and confident, and who always gets what she wants.

  But I look at her as she walks out of the door, and she is nothing at all like my sister. She is very tall and quite thin, dressed in fashionable plaid shorts and a bright pink top. She is red-haired and, I think, has freckles across the bridge of her nose. Certainly not in the least bit a Jew. Of course.

  She yanks something hard across the doorway, and when I process what it is, I cannot help it, I let out a little gasp. It is a pram, and inside there is a baby, a girl I am guessing, judging by the pink she is draped in.

  The woman turns and looks in my direction, perhaps having heard my conspicuous gasp, and I want to duck, or run, but my feet stay frozen. “Miss, do you mind?” she asks me. I turn to make sure it is me she is talking to, but I am the only woman standing there on the sidewalk. “This stroller is impossible to get down the steps.”

  I realize she is asking for my help, and I walk in her direction, toward the sound of her pure and self-assured voice. I climb up the steps slowly. One, two, three, four, five . . .

  “Could you hold this end while I lock the door?” She pushes the handle of the pram in my direction, and then I have no choice but to take it or watch the baby plunge down the steps. I take the handle. “I don’t know what I was thinking. A house with steps like this and a stroller.” She shakes her head as she turns the key in the lock. The baby lets out another cry, and I grip tightly to the handle. It is metal and cold against my burning flesh. “Don’t cry, darling,” the woman says, making eyes at the baby. “Mommy will be there in a second.” She locks the door, and she grabs the back end of the stroller. “Do you mind helping me carry this down the steps?”

  I don’t say anything. I cannot. But I am not going to let go of the handle either. Partly because I do not want the baby to fall, and partly because I am staring at her, this woman and the sharpness of her red hair, and yes, the cluster of freckles on the bridge of her nose. She is adorably and distinctly American.

  We reach the bottom of the steps, and she smiles at me. “Thank you so much,” she says. I nod as she turns the stroller, and then I can see the baby. She is a big baby, maybe closer to a one-year-old, or maybe just big. I do not know enough about these things to tell. She is swathed in pink, and for a moment I wonder if her name is Auguste, after Peter’s mother, or Margot, or even Anne.

  “What’s her name?” I murmur, before I can stop myself.

  “Eleanor,” the woman says, smiling at me as she pushes the stroller toward the powdery-pink Cadillac. She waves as she helps the baby into the car and folds the pram into the trunk. “Thanks
again,” she calls as she slips easily into the driver’s seat and backs out of the parking space.

  Eleanor, I think. There was no Eleanor in Peter’s family.

  But then I remind myself, only Jewish people name their children to honor the dead. The Gentiles, they name their children to honor the living.

  In my sister’s published diary, there is a place where she talks about kissing Peter for the first time, and everything in that kiss, it changed her. She was no longer a girl, but a woman. Suddenly she was lovable.

  Every time I read that passage, I feel as if I am reading a memory, the retelling of a dream, typed out right there inside a book probably millions of people have now read. That is me. Surely, these feelings, she found them in my diary first.

  But there is something else. A line she wrote that catches me every time, a line that says my sister and Peter, they kissed by the window.

  I did not write that. I did not do that. Peter and I, we always stayed on the divan when we were in his room. After a while the window frightened me, the idea that we could be spotted, or even become swathed in moonlight. When you are hiding for so very long, light becomes your enemy, a beacon of exposure. I never went to the window in Peter’s room. We never kissed by the window.

  “Who’s Johann?” My sister asked, about my first diary.

  “No one,” I said. “I’m just telling stories.”

  My sister had a gift for telling stories. She told them sometimes to Mother when she wanted to get out of chores, or to Father just for fun, just to make him laugh. She told them to me as we lay there together, our pens dancing across the pages of our diaries. “Margola,” she would say, “I have a fairy tale for you. With a happy ending. I adore happy endings, don’t you?”

  I often tell myself that in her diary, she was romanticizing what she thought love might have been, in hiding, and at her tender age. Perhaps she thought the window would make a nice symbol of the outside world, so close to freedom, and yet so far away.

  But as I lie in bed, late into the night, thinking about the red-haired woman and baby Eleanor, I cannot stop imagining my sister and Peter standing by the window, holding on to each other tightly, kissing each other, as if it is not a story at all, but a memory I have now long since forgotten.

  What if I have been wrong? I wonder. What if I have been wrong about everything?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  WHEN MY PHONE RINGS SUNDAY MORNING, I AM STILL THINKING about baby Eleanor. I have been thinking about her all weekend, actually. Through the glow of my Shabbat candle Friday night, in the unsteady words of my novel yesterday afternoon, and now this morning as I stare blankly at my paralegal studies, I am trying to remember if I saw her eyes. They were blue, I am sure of it. Blue, like the sea. Or maybe paler like sky. Or were they green, like the redheaded woman’s must have certainly been? The fact that I cannot really remember makes me want to go back to the house, to watch the mother and child again, to see if I can see it there, even the smallest bit of Peter in Eleanor’s face.

  But then the phone begins ringing. Rabbi Epstein’s Jews. Three women calling, all of them, one after another, as if they planned it this way, and I wonder if they are friends.

  I picture them sitting inside Beth Shalom on hard pine benches, their shoulders touching as they listen to Rabbi Epstein speak: Ada, Miriam, Reisel. I imagine them as older women and frail, their tattoos stretching over wrinkled flesh. But Ada tells me that she was born in Philadelphia, that her mother emigrated from Lithuania, and so I imagine she had the American version of wartime, that she is not even marked as a Jew, and that it’s possible even that she is younger than I am.

  “How much can you get for us?” the third woman, Reisel, asks me. She says it as if she is bargaining at the Reading Terminal Market, the way Ilsa always tries to. “Selling those peaches at such a price is highway robbery,” she’ll insist, and yet she’ll buy them anyway, even if the vendor won’t bring down the price. But most of the time, for Ilsa, they do. She has that effect on people.

  “Right now,” I tell Reisel, “my boss is just collecting names, and we will contact you when he has a plan.”

  “But how much can you get for us?” she repeats. “What is the price for being a Jew these days in Philly?”

  I cannot tell if she is being serious or facetious, but I can feel her hatred, thick and overpowering, like the wool of a sweater, even through the telephone. “Should I give my boss your name?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then: “Why not? What else have I got to lose?”

  I think about Reisel, even after I hang up the phone. What else have I got to lose? she asked me. I wonder then, what she has lost. Or not what, but how much, who?

  There were stories of guards—and not even the guards they hung after Nuremberg, but ones who slithered away into the world after the war—who came in at night after everyone was sleeping and took a woman out to rape her. Sometimes, if she was lucky, they brought her back. Mostly they beat her and then threw her away, like garbage. There was Josef Mengele, a doctor, who I heard Walter Cronkite talk about on the radio, afterward. “Angel of Death,” Mr. Cronkite called him, for the medical experiments he performed on Jews, simply because he could. Josef Mengele was not at Nuremberg, though he should’ve been. What happened to him? I imagine he escaped like me and is hiding somewhere in America. That he has also found a second skin, working as a physician in an American hospital. America is a good hiding place, for Jews as well as Nazis—a faraway place where the war was something else, something entirely different.

  I do not like to think about these things, about the camps, about what did happen, about what could’ve happened.

  I do not like to think about them, but then Reisel’s words, they do nothing but make me think about them.

  If we are counting up losses, really truly counting each and every thing, I would also include my diary from that time, those two years in the annex. Maybe it seems like nothing, not compared to the people, the places, the lives. But it was not nothing—it was something. Two entire years of my life. It was my story. If I had it now, that time would still be real. And so I often wonder about it.

  For a long time I imagined that it was Miep who found my sister’s diary on the floor in Peter’s room after we were taken. I imagined that she picked it up. That she also found mine hidden under the mattress.

  When the war was over, I imagined Pim returning to 263 Prinsengracht. He walked into the office and found Miep at her desk, and she pulled the books out of the drawer where she’d hidden them.

  Pim had hope then that we were still alive, until he saw the Red Cross lists, the same ones that Brigitta brought to me, which said it, right there, my sister’s name and mine, marked with crosses.

  I do not imagine that Pim would’ve even opened the diaries until he thought we were dead. Pim would not ever have read our diaries without our permission. But then, once we were dead, I imagined that he opened them because he was grieving. Because it was all that was left of us.

  If nothing else, Father is a good businessman, and when he realized he could get the diaries published, make money, profit from the books, I am sure he thought, Why shouldn’t I? Perhaps he also thought at first that it was the only justice he could get for us, for all of us. Hanging a few Nazis, it was nothing. The world needed to understand more, to see more.

  But this is where my imagination goes awry. What happened to my diary? Why did Pim publish my sister’s and not mine?

  For a long while I imagined it was the publisher who said to Father that he could not publish two daughters’ diaries, that it would confuse his message, sully it, tarnish the face he might be able to give to the terrible suffering for the Jews, the face of a young, innocent girl who had so much life left to live when it was stolen away.

  I imagined they said to Father, This is the only way. The only justice you can get for both your
daughters.

  And then I imagined they looked Father in the eyes and said, Now, which one? Whose diary is it? Who is the face of the Holocaust, Mr. Frank? And of course, who would he choose?

  But now I do not know what to believe. Father is a good businessman. If he had my diary, I think of all the money he could make from telling the other sister’s story, my story. So maybe it conflicts with my sister’s; so maybe the world would be just as confused as I am now about who it was that Peter loved. But still, there is money to be made. Justice to be had.

  Now I often wonder if the reason why my diary has not been published is that it was never recovered. I hope that is the truth. Because the other option is that Father has it, that he hangs on to it still, waiting, waiting, for just the right time to release it into the world.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I LIE IN BED AWAKE FOR A LONG WHILE, HEARING REISEL’S voice, imagining Eleanor’s eyes, and thinking about my diary resting uneasily in Pim’s hands. When I finally do fall asleep, I have the nightmare I have had so many times that sometimes now when I awake, I cannot remember if it is just a nightmare or a memory I’ve suppressed.

  My sister and I, we are huddled together, in a pile of bodies in the camp. There are fleas jumping on us, and we watch them bounce in the air like sparks. We would be itching but we are too tired, too sick to move, and besides, we are no longer feeling anything.

  Mother is next to us. “Hold on,” she whispers. “Just a little while longer.”

  And then suddenly she is bleeding. Blood pours from her mouth, like a faucet turned up too high, red spilling everywhere, all over my sister and me, covering all of us.

  I open my mouth to scream but no sound escapes me. My throat is too parched. I haven’t had enough to drink in weeks.