Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  Her father drowns in a canal four years later. Esther is bundled across the city at night: snow over the jetties, vapor rising from the holes in sewer lids. One-horse carriages scuttle along through the falling white.

  The Hirschfeld Trust Girls’ Orphanage at Number 30 Papendam is a five-story rowhouse in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. In its dormitories a dozen girls sleep on folding cots. They wear their hair in tandem plaits; they wear matching black stockings and shin-length dresses. They walk to gymnastics class on Tuesday evenings, repair their clothes on Wednesday evenings, weave matzah baskets on Thursday evenings. Every morning the House Directress, Frau Cohen, listens to the girls read in synchrony from donated readers. Little Solomon is sweeping the coal bin. Little Isaac is pulling his wagon.

  Esther has been at Number 30 Papendam for a year when she begins having temporal lobe epileptic seizures. She smells an overwhelming odor of celery when none is present. She stands in the parlor downstairs and a sense of impending annihilation swamps her and for a full minute she cannot respond to anything anyone says to her.

  Months later, when Esther is six, she is sitting in the washroom in a chair beside the three iron bathtubs, waiting her turn for a bath, when she hears what sounds like a steam engine rumble to life in the distance. Within seconds the train sounds as if it has drawn close enough to explode through the wall. None of the other girls glance up. Frau Cohen carries in a stack of folded nightdresses, her sleeves rolled up, three strands of hair hanging over her eyes. She looks at Esther and tilts her head slightly. Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out.

  Esther clamps her palms over her ears. The train roars as if through the throat of a tunnel. Any second it will be upon her; any second she will be crushed. Then the train passes through her head.

  Here is what the other girls see: Little Esther slips off the chair in the corner, lands on her side on the tile, and starts convulsing. Her wrists curl inward. Her eyes blink a dozen times a second.

  Here is what Esther sees: an unfurnished room. The train is gone, the girls are gone, Hirschfeld House is gone. Violet, snow-refracted light washes through two windows. A man and woman sit cross-legged on the floor. For a moment they look together up through a window into the snow as it blows past apartment houses across the street.

  “First we die,” the woman says. “Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths.”

  Esther can feel, distantly, that her body is kicking.

  “Then,” continues the woman, “in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And when the last one of them dies, we finally die our third death.”

  Out the window wind catches the snow and seems to blow it upward, back into the clouds. “That’s when we’re released to the next world,” the woman says. In the Hirschfeld House bathroom, one of the girls screams. Frau Cohen drops the stack of nightdresses. Maybe nine seconds pass. Esther wakes up.

  3.

  Seventy-five years later, eighty-one-year-old Esther Gramm finds herself flat on her back in her garden in Geneva, Ohio. She is a widow, a grower of prize-winning carrots, and a mildly celebrated illustrator of children’s books. She lives alone in a pale blue ranch house on thirteen acres of maples and poplars four miles from Lake Erie. She has lived here for fifty years.

  Esther’s son and his blond, cross-country-skiing wife live next door in a white colonial on the other side of a wall of willows. Four days ago they flew to Changsha, China, to adopt twin girls. But there have been visa problems, an unexpected bungling of documents. Suddenly everything is in question. They’ve told their twenty-year-old son, Robert—a college junior home for the summer—that they may have to remain in China for several weeks.

  Esther’s left hand is clamped in her grandson’s right. Her whole body, even the backs of her hands, is damp with sweat. The windows of her house, visible between the slats of her garden fence, glow lightly against the dusk. Robert presses his fist into his forehead. “Four this week,” he says.

  “They’re real,” Esther whispers. She sits up too quickly and her eyesight flees in long streaks. Robert retrieves her eyeglasses, helps her to her feet.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” he says. Clouds of gnats throb against the sky. The first bats whirl out of the trees.

  “No.” Esther shuts her eyes—they feel strangely untethered. “No hospital.”

  She leans on him as they cross the lawn. He lays her on her couch; he stabs buttons on his little black telephone.

  “Dad?” says Robert. “Dad?” A dull pressure pulses against Esther’s temples.

  “I saw it again,” she whispers. “A tall house in a yard of thistles.”

  “It was a seizure, Grandmom,” Robert says, peering into the screen of his phone. “You were only out for nine seconds. I timed it start to finish. You were in the garden the whole time.”

  “It felt like hours,” Esther mumbles. “It felt like all day.”

  “Dad,” says Robert, talking into the phone now. “She had another one.” Robert explains, nods, explains some more. Then he passes the phone to Esther and she listens to her son berate her from eight thousand miles away. He says she must go to the neurology clinic in Cleveland. He says she is being pigheaded, stubborn, impossible. She says she is stronger than he is six days a week.

  “Think about Robert.” Her son’s voice is close, cracking; he sounds as if he might still be next door. But when Esther thinks of the clinic she sees palsied faces riding elevators in chrome wheelchairs; she sees cartoon-character bedscreens behind which rest the shaved heads of children.

  “This whole thing is such a fuckup,” says her son. “Maybe we should just come home.”

  “You handle your problems,” says Esther. “I’ll handle mine.”

  She hands the phone back. Robert presses END. They eat scrambled eggs in the dimness of the kitchen. Fireflies drift and flash in the amphitheater of her huge backyard. Robert says, “Promise me. If you have one more, we’ll go.”

  Esther looks over at him. Five-foot-two Robert in his blue sweatshirt and army shorts and flip-flops forking in mouthfuls of eggs. Robert has been recording interviews with Esther over the past several weeks for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. Something to do with history classes in college. A thesis, he calls it. “Okay,” she says. “I promise.”

  Robert walks home. Esther feels her way down the hall and climbs into bed fully clothed. Her brain swings and bangs inside her skull. These past weeks she has been sensing shapes flowing beneath the objects of her room; she has heard violin music sifting out through the backyard trees. And her senses seem to have grown more acute: She does not want to cook, or weed, or read; she wants only to lean on her elbows in the garden and watch the leaves unfurl, and thicken, and shine. Yesterday she walked the long driveway to the mailbox in a slow drizzle and paused with her hand on the fence and sat down in the gravel and stared up, and let the rain fall into her eyes, and was certain for a long moment that she could sense a silvery, restless world rippling just beneath this one.

  Now in her bedroom at 9 p.m., with the lamp extinguished beside her, streams of unbidden memories rise—decades old, deeply buried. She hears the bustle and rush of Hirschfeld House, feet scrambling down the stairwell, dresses flapping on lines in the garden, dance music streaming out of the big, walnut-paneled wireless Radiola V in the parlor. Every Sabbath for eleven years Esther used to take her place at the long refectory table and look from the backs of her hands to the backs of the hands of the other girls, Miriam and Regina and Hanelore and Else arrayed around the table in prayer, and wonder about family, about heredity. Time compresses; Esther blinks into the darkness and wonders for a long moment if she is no longer in Ohio at all, but back inside the rowhouse at Number 30 Papendam, more than half a century ago, a dozen girls on two benches, a dozen young hearts thrumming beneath their sweaters, three blue streetlamps swaying in the wind outside the windows.

  4.
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br />   With a key Dr. Rosenbaum scratches the soles of six-year-old Esther’s feet; with a silver reflector he gazes into her pupils. He listens carefully to her description of the man and the woman and the snow blowing upward.

  “Fascinating, these hallucinations,” he murmurs. “Do you think she could be imagining her parents?”

  Frau Cohen frowns; she does not like fanciful talk. “Is it the falling sickness?”

  “Maybe,” the doctor says. “More fat in her diet. Fewer sugars. Let’s not pack her into the asylum just yet.”

  Two weeks after the seizure in the bathroom, Esther has another. Again she finds herself watching a man and woman in an unfurnished house. This time they pad down a stairwell into a twilit city. They wind between canyons of terrace houses for what seems like several hours, joining a slow march of others out in the cold. Everyone moves in the same direction. Snow lands on the shoulders of their coats and gathers in the brims of their hats.

  Dr. Rosenbaum prescribes a bitter-smelling anticonvulsant called phenobarbital. It comes in a jar the size of Esther’s fist. A glass dropper is slotted through the lid. Esther is supposed to swallow six drops three times a day.

  A month passes. Then another. Sometimes Esther feels slow and glassy; sometimes she finds it impossible to sit still during lessons. But the drug works: Her moods stabilize; her mind does not derail.

  Miriam Ingrid Bergen, a long-waisted seven-year-old with a delicate chin and a penchant for risk, takes Esther under her wing. She shows her where Frau Cohen keeps her tobacco, which bakeries will hand out scraps of dough; she explains which boys in the market are trustworthy and which are not. Together the two of them stand in the Hirschfeld House bathroom and stack their hair in various arrangements and draw ink around the rims of their eyes and laugh into the mirror until their ribs ache.

  Esther spends much of the rest of her time drawing. She sketches ancient cities, tattooed giants, banners fluttering from spires. She draws fifty-story bell towers, torch-lined tunnels, bridges made from thread, strange amalgamations of imagination and what feels peculiarly like memory.

  She turns seven; she turns eight. One month, it seems, no one in Hamburg is wearing armbands and the next month practically everyone is. Photos in Reich newspapers show soldiers on parade, tanks draped in roses, plantations of flags. In one picture six German fighter-bombers fly in formation, wingtip to wingtip, suspended above a mountain range of clouds. Eight-year-old Esther studies it. Spangles of sun flash from the windshields. Each pilot leans slightly forward. As if glory is a lamp dangling just beyond the blades of the propellors.

  Little tin stormtroopers appear in toy shop windows, some with flutes, some with drums, some on glossy, black stallions. Boys from other neighborhoods march past Hirschfeld House and yell crude songs up at the windows. Frau Cohen is spit on as she waits in a queue to buy cheese.

  The sleeping giant is waking up, says the wireless in the living room. A year of unprecedented victories and triumphs is behind us. Courage, confidence and optimism fill the German people.

  “Citizenships are being revoked,” Frau Cohen tells the Hirschfeld girls as they sew a thicker set of drapes for the dormitory windows. “The directors say we need to start preparing for Auswanderung.”

  Auswanderung: It means emigration. To Esther the word evokes images of butterfly migrations; desert nomads rolling up tents; the long, unpinned chevrons of geese that pass over the house in autumn.

  Frau Cohen stays up late writing letters to the Youth Welfare Department, to the German-Israelite Community Office. The Hirschfeld girls are given English lessons, Dutch lessons, comportment lessons. Esther and Miriam hold hands between their cots in the winter darkness and Esther whispers destinations into the space above their beds: Argentina, Antarctica, Australia.

  “I hope,” Esther says, “we are sent together.”

  “Only children from the same family,” Miriam says, “get sent together.”

  The radio says, The Führer’s relationship to children never ceases to move and amaze us. They approach him with complete trust, and he meets them with the same trust. He alone is to be thanked for the fact that for German children, a German life has once again become worth living.

  On Esther’s ninth birthday Dr. Rosenbaum arrives with nine pencils wrapped in ribbon. “Growing up so tall,” he marvels. He replenishes Esther’s bottle of anticonvulsant; he asks her a series of questions about her latest illustrations. He looks for a long time at a drawing in which a miniature city sprouts from the head of a pin: tiny rooftops covered with tinier tiles, tiny flags waving from infinitesimal spires.

  “Extraordinary,” he declares.

  At dinner all the girls sit as close as they can to Dr. Rosenbaum’s wife, a tiny woman with bright silver hair who smells of cashmere and perfume. She tells the girls about bridges over the Arno, apiaries in the Luxembourg Gardens, sailboats in the Aegean. After the meal the oldest girls serve cake on the Hirschfeld House tea set, and everyone gathers around Frau Rosenbaum in the parlor to examine her picture postcards: Stockholm, London, Miami. Spiderwebs of rain fall past the windows. Violin music whispers out of the big Radiola V. Frau Rosenbaum describes the November light in Venice, how it simultaneously hardens and softens everything.

  “In the evenings that light is like liquid,” she sighs. “You want to drink it.”

  Esther closes her eyes; she sees archways, canals, staircases coiling around mile-high towers. She sees a man and a woman crouched in front of a window, cross-hatchings of snow falling beyond the glass.

  When she opens her eyes, a crow is sitting on a branch just outside the window. It turns an eye toward her, cocks its head, blinks. Esther walks toward it, sets her palm against a pane. Does she see it? Just there? Something glowing between its feathers? Some other world folded inside this one?

  The crow flaps away. The branch bobs.

  Frau Rosenbaum murmurs another story; the girls sigh and giggle. Esther looks out into the night and thinks: We wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died.

  5.

  Eighty-one-year-old Esther wakes at 6 a.m. and has to lean against the wall as she walks to the bathroom. Her whole house seems to sway back and forth, as though in the night someone has towed it four miles north and set it adrift upon the swells of Lake Erie.

  The sun rises. She makes herself toast but has no appetite for it. Out in the garden a rabbit sits chewing, but Esther cannot muster the effort to scare it away. Just now her stomach feels as if it is pulsing, as if hornets are convening inside it.

  A train roars to life in the distance. Esther kneels, then falls onto her side. She seizes.

  In something like a dream, Esther watches Miriam Ingrid Bergen lead Hanelore Goldschmidt up the stairwell of a tall, narrow house.

  Three flights, four flights. The rooms they pass have nothing in them. At the top of the stairwell Miriam pushes through a trapdoor into an attic. From twin hexagonal windows in the dormers they peer out.

  Dangling fire escapes, truncated chimneys, rusted ducting. A narrow canal choked with trees. All the rooftops have weeds sprouting from between tiles; some have caved in entirely. No smoke. No trams, no lorries, no generators, no whanging hammers or clopping horses or shouting children. No surface clatter. No sheets of newsprint flying in the wind.

  “Is this Hamburg?” whispers Hanelore.

  Miriam doesn’t answer. She is looking at a distant building perhaps twenty stories tall: the tallest building she can see. From its roof a steel-lattice radio antenna anchored with guy wires rises still higher; at its very summit a single green beacon flashes.

  A flock of small black birds wheels slowly around it.

  “Where is everybody?” asks Hanelore.

  “I don’t know,” says Miriam.

  They return downstairs. The other girls sit against the walls wordless and afraid and a bit hungry. Sand in their eyes. The smaller ones nodding off again. Phrases flutter between them. “No matches?” “There�
�s no one?” “How can there be no one?” The wind, washing through the cracked windows, carries the smell of seawater. The big, empty house moans. The thistles creak.

  Esther wakes up. She has another generalized seizure in her bathroom at noon. And a third in the kitchen around dusk. Each time she sees the girls she lived with as a child. They drink from a nearby canal; they collect crabapples and carry them back to the house in the pulled-up hems of their dresses. They go to sleep shivering on the floor in front of the cold hearth.

  After dark Esther finds herself in her bed not entirely sure how she got there. There is a smell in the air like dust, like old paper, like nothing alive.

  Leaves swish against the gutters of her house, a sound like lapping water. She cannot remember if she has eaten anything since breakfast. She knows she should call Robert but the energy to sit up and reach for the telephone will not come. Out her window, clouds blow past stars. On their huge undersides she imagines she can see the reflected wash of an antenna beacon as it flashes green, green, green.

  6.

  Autumn in Hamburg, 1937, and the house martins depart for the Sahara. The storks, Dr. Rosenbaum has told Esther, will travel all the way to South Africa. While all through the country Jewish people are hurrying north, in the opposite direction, toward the ports.

  Signs sprout outside the butcher’s, outside the theater, outside Schlösser’s restaurant, always painted in the same trim calligraphy. Juden sind hier unerwünscht. No walks for pleasure. No smiling. No eye contact. These rules are not written down but they might as well be.

  Esther is ten when the first emigration letter arrives. “The elders have arranged for Nancy to be emigrated to Warsaw,” Frau Cohen announces. Several girls clap; others hold their hands over their mouths. Everyone looks at Nancy, who chews her bottom lip.

  Out, away, Auswanderung. Warsaw: Esther imagines grand palaces, silver candlesticks, food carts rattling through ballrooms. She draws streetlamps reflected in a river and a four-wheeled carriage pulled by two white horses bedecked in bells. A trim driver with a tasseled whip rides on the box and inside a little girl in long gloves sits behind a veil of silk.