Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  “That’s in your head,” Robert says. He twirls his father’s car keys around his index finger. “The doctor says what you see is only real in your head.”

  “Real in my head?” whispers Esther. “Isn’t everything that’s real only real in our heads?”

  “He says without the medications you’ll have more seizures. You could die.”

  Esther tries to sit up. “Robert,” she says. Out the window the clouds have darkened considerably. “Bobby. Look at me.” Her grandson turns. “Do I look like I have a lot of time left?”

  Robert bites his lower lip.

  “I need to go home.”

  “You said that, Grandmom.”

  “What if they’re not in my head? What if they’re real? Waiting for me?”

  “Waiting for you to do what?”

  Esther doesn’t answer.

  Robert’s voice quivers. “You’re asking me to help you die.”

  “I’m asking you to help me live.”

  12.

  The police condemn a Jewish nursing home four blocks away. Frau Cohen takes in twenty elderly people. The men cram into the parlor; the women divide themselves between the sewing room and the dormitories.

  Two weeks later ten more elderly people appear at the front door. By mid-January, Number 30 Papendam brims with people, anxiety, and lice. Every Wednesday Frau Cohen boils pots of disinfectant. Displaced people are camped out in the cellar, in the custodian’s closet, in the classroom, and on the floor of the dining room—a typist, a former librarian, a retired professor, merchants and jewelers. Each walls off a few square feet of floor space with suitcases, some fractured polygon in which to lay out clothes or play cards or dream.

  Esther wakes at night with her wrist throbbing beneath its makeshift splint. Coughs ricochet up through the walls; girls scratch themselves in their sleep. Weeks pass without a seizure, then three or four come in a cluster: exhausting episodes, preceded by a minute or two of giddiness during which the train roars toward her and everything seems to speed up and glow, as if the walls of Hirschfeld House might incandesce.

  Esther wakes to the aged faces of strangers peering down at her in equal parts concern and horror. As if they look down at something from another planet. Her handwriting goes berserk. When she walks up the stairs Miriam has to take her elbow. “You’re not walking straight, Esther. You keep veering to your left.” In the mirror she is a fragile, sickly creature with outsized eyes.

  At meals everyone watches how much Frau Cohen spoons onto plates. Esther can feel the eyes of the men on her as she eats. In her mind she hears Regina’s voice: They’re taking epileptics, too.

  Esther and Miriam spend nights hand-in-hand. A floor below a man reads aloud in Hebrew about the children of Israel. His words seem to reverberate through the tall house. Thy walking through this great wilderness these forty years the Lord thy God hath been with thee; thou hast lacked nothing…

  Beyond the curtains snow taps against the windowglass. Crows blow above the leafless trees. A last few gas-burning trucks roll through the neighborhood flicking their wipers and the canals roil beneath the bridges, and from the station another train rolls steadily east, through the snow, flickering its faint lights.

  13.

  Robert sneaks her out of the clinic in the middle of a thunderstorm. The nurses gather at a window to watch the lightning, and Robert and Esther make straight for the elevator. They ride six flights down and walk out the sliding front doors. Rain assaults the parking lot. They sit in the Nissan and run the heater; the windshield wipers fly back and forth.

  He says, “Shouldn’t we have filled out papers or something?”

  “It’s not a jail,” Esther says.

  Robert whispers to himself as he drives. Esther leans her head against the headrest. Her left side buzzes with a curious numbness; the thrill of escaping lingers in her chest. The far edges of the highway seem to glow; taillights in front of them ripple in the rain. The little car planes east. Esther closes her eyes; she sees the blush in Bela Cohn’s cheeks from warm bathwater, all her blood vessels open. She sees the egg-shaped face of two-year-old Anita Weiss turn up to her, eyes shining. She sees the forehead of Regina Goldschmidt bunch into furrows, threatening to tell Frau Cohen about some transgression or another. She sees the quick, busy hands of Hanelore Goldschmidt, and the dark, wild beauty of Miriam Ingrid Bergen. She sees Hamburg in the months before they left it: the blacked-out windows, the gloom of Laufgraben and Beneckestrasse, the sense that the city had become a twilit labyrinth, as if the trisecting realities of her life, her drawings, and her seizures had all fused into one.

  Rain pounds the windshield. The air smells like iron. “Thank you,” whispers Esther. “Thank you, Robert.”

  14.

  Rationing. Confinement. Miriam and Esther begin spending afternoons in the Hirschfeld House attic: a refuge strung with cobwebs and crammed with ancient donations. Twin hexagonal windows look out over the neighboring rooftops. With the windows open they can hear the snuffling of the confined people in all the houses around them, whispered prayers rising through ceilings, rumors drifting along hallways, final hopes settling into walls.

  In the back of the attic looms a half-ton cedar wardrobe, thick-paneled, painted white. Esther can stand on the low shelf inside without her head reaching the top. She starts spending whole afternoons up there, clambering over the old tables and lamps to kneel in the huge wardrobe and draw labyrinths with the stub of her last pencil onto the smooth, white interior panels. She draws bridges interlacing above other bridges, column-faced temples, trees growing upside-down in caverns. As if inventing a haven into which she and Miriam might flee.

  It’s March when Esther descends into the dining room and sees Dr. Rosenbaum talking with Frau Cohen. He’s wearing a brown suit and a maroon tie and at first glance Esther decides he must not be real.

  But he is. He’s frighteningly thin. The hems of his trousers are pulped and one shoe is missing a lace. Half-moons of dirt are grooved under his fingernails. He embraces Esther for a long time. From a pocket he withdraws two pencils, brand-new, bright red. To Esther their very existence seems almost impossible.

  She whispers in his ear. “I ran out of medicine.”

  “Everybody has run out of everything.”

  “And I’ve been seeing people crammed into houses. People squatting on sidewalks. Waiting for something.”

  Dr. Rosenbaum nods. “Like when you were little.”

  “There are more of them now,” Esther says. Whether she means people or seizures Dr. Rosenbaum does not ask.

  He was in a labor camp for nearly a year. They only released him, he says, because he is a doctor. He has not seen his wife in all that time. “Minsk,” he mumbles. “They say they sent her to Minsk.”

  Dr. Rosenbaum spends nearly all his time at Number 30 Papendam, examining the sick, plucking nits from the children’s heads, or sitting in the garden, oblivious to the cold, collar unbuttoned, coat around his shoulders, his back against a tree, his big hands in his lap like listless machines. At nights he goes to sleep amongst the men, his grizzled head laid across his leather instrument bag, his steel-framed glasses folded atop his chest. Esther sits with him whenever she can. “Minsk,” she whispers. “Do you think she’s happy there?”

  “Happy?” asks Dr. Rosenbaum. He looks down at Esther with a look she cannot understand—it seems part heartache, part wistfulness, part amazement. He pats her head and looks away.

  The days ratchet past. Frau Cohen drills her charges in ever-increasing regimentation—reading requirements, calculation speeds, Bible stories. Homework, supper, prayer, sleep. But for Esther time is beginning to disintegrate; twice in April she finds herself a block away and cannot remember how she got there. Sometimes she finds Miriam is holding her hand in the attic, or on a bench outside an unfamiliar house.

  “You wandered off, Esther. You wouldn’t listen to me. You kept asking me where you were.”

  She rests her head on Miri
am’s shoulder; she listens to her friend’s slow, reliable breathing. “Remember the pendulum?” she asks.

  Years earlier, in what seems now like a former world, Dr. Rosenbaum had taken several of the girls to the cinema for Esther’s birthday. The newsreel before the film showed a temple in Paris. Inside, beneath a huge, vaulted dome, a golden ball swung from a two-hundred-foot wire. On the bottom of the ball was a pin, and as it swung on its wire, the pin scraped a design into sand scattered across the floor. Foucault’s pendulum marked the turning of the Earth, said the narrator; it always swung; it never stopped.

  Now, sitting with her ear against Miriam’s rib cage, Esther can see the pendulum swinging above the city: huge, terrible, swinging on and on, ruthless, incessant; it grooves and regrooves its inhuman truth into the air.

  15.

  In Ohio Robert makes his grandmother meals, telephones his parents twice daily, and sleeps on Esther’s sofa. Occasionally he opens his laptop, intending to work on his thesis, and stares at the screen for a while.

  Esther seems happier, he thinks, to be at home, among her houseplants and drawings and teakettles. She can get herself dressed; with a cane she can move in a slow triangle from the bathroom to the bedroom to the kitchen. In two weeks his parents will be home; in a month Robert will be back at school.

  Two days after returning from the clinic Esther is standing at her bathroom sink when the train roars in the distance. She takes a knee, then lets herself down onto the carpet. In something like a dream she watches Miriam, Hanelore, and five-year-old Ilouka Croner walk ruined, buckled streets. Gulls cruise overhead like ghosts. They pass the rusting skeleton of a crane and listen to a roof leak into a hollow warehouse and wander through factories stripped of machinery. Finally they reach the twenty-story building Miriam has been looking for. When the girls look up they can see a grid of windows narrowing as they rise and the naked struts of the huge radio antenna ascending into the sky. Its beacon flashes green, goes dark, flashes again.

  The stairwell is unlocked and unlit. Hanelore leads; Miriam carries Ilouka on her shoulders. Fifteen flights, sixteen flights. At the top floor is a single door with no knob. Hanelore looks back at Miriam, then pushes it open. The entire top story is an expansive square room with no dividing walls. Six windows on each side look down onto a panorama of the city.

  The girls step inside breathing heavily. In the center of the big room a chrome broadcast microphone sits in a stand on top of a wooden table. No wires lead from the microphone. There appears to be no other entrance into the space. Just twenty-four windows, several missing their glass. And the table. And the microphone on top.

  Miriam lets Ilouka down. The harbor beyond the city is calm and gray beneath a slow drizzle. Along its shoreline strands of weed are strung and a wooden promenade has slumped off its piers and fields of rain fall across the water. A low, wet breeze flies through the room.

  No boats winking out there. No buoys sounding their bells. Nothing on the horizon.

  Rain falls on the sea. Out there fish travel in numberless schools and whales freight their colossal hearts through the cold dark. Ilouka looks up at Hanelore. “What is that?”

  “It’s a microphone.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “For talking to people.”

  “What people?”

  Hanelore looks at Miriam. Miriam walks barefoot to the table in her ragged dress. She leans over the microphone. She whispers, “Esther?”

  16.

  “I saw Frau Rosenbaum,” Esther tells Dr. Rosenbaum. He is sitting in his usual place against the tree in the garden. It’s a bright spring day and several of the people working amongst the seedlings straighten and look over. “I saw her walking through a city. She was singing to herself.”

  Frau Cohen is washing pots in the corner of the yard. “You should be in arithmetic, Esther,” she says.

  Esther says, “She sang, What can grow, grow without rain? What can burn and never end?”

  Dr. Rosenbaum sits up very straight. He looks at Esther with his palms pressed flat against the ground.

  “That’s enough, Esther,” says Frau Cohen. To Dr. Rosenbaum she says, “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “They were in a city but they walked out of the city and through a forest into a valley full of tents. They were all moving toward these tents and the fabric of the tents was flapping in the wind. Frau Rosenbaum sang, A stone, a stone can grow, grow without rain; Love, love can burn and never end.”

  Emotions are flowing across Dr. Rosenbaum’s face like clouds; he is, Esther realizes, clutching her forearm.

  “Enough, Esther!” says Frau Cohen.

  “Draw it for me,” whispers Dr. Rosenbaum.

  She draws the scene as she remembers it on the interior of the doors of the white wardrobe with her last pencil. She draws a sprawling, smoking city with a harbor on one side and a forest on the other. At the far edge of the forest she draws hundreds of tents hemmed in by the walls of a valley. Finally she draws Frau Rosenbaum, a tiny figure in a long procession of pilgrims: silver hair, a long coat, her mouth open in song.

  After three days Esther calls Dr. Rosenbaum into the attic. He climbs into the wardrobe, knees cracking. With a candle in his fist he studies the drawings; he moves his face closer; he mutters to himself.

  Esther sits on the floor on her hands. The old doctor hunkers in the wardrobe, back to her, the candlelight silhouetting him. After a minute she sees him extend a long finger and lightly touch the figure of his wife amidst the inch-high rows of pilgrims.

  She thinks: And when the last one of them dies, we finally die our third death.

  When Dr. Rosenbaum climbs out of the wardrobe, he looks at Esther for a very long time. In the morning he’s gone.

  17.

  Around noon, every day, Robert escorts Esther to the deck behind her house and sits her down in a patio chair beneath an umbrella. As the hours pass she swings between two versions of herself: one present, even talkative, using a cane to hobble out to the garden, staring into her honeysuckle vines, the flowers fluttering in a strange, hinged way, as if each is stirred by a different wind. She nudges a branch with the tip of her cane; the flowers become butterflies and flap away.

  Then there’s the other Esther, a darker, hallucinating, nauseous Esther, who arrives in the evening. Crows spiral down out of the helmet of the sky; her accent thickens; phrases of German and Hebrew stir up from recesses of her memory. She is tipped backward in time.

  Four days after she leaves the clinic, the vision in Esther’s left eye starts to dwindle. When she closes her right one she can watch the backyard diminish gradually: first the trees, then the grass, then the sky, until all that remains are the posts of the garden fence, like bolts of white cloth, or housedresses rippling against the encroaching gray.

  Sometimes Robert reads quietly to her from the newspaper. Sometimes he sketches in a notebook: trees, flowers, things he would not be brave enough to show his friends. And sometimes he sets his little digital recorder in front of her and asks her questions.

  “Tell me about Grandpa.”

  “Grandpa?”

  “Dad’s dad.”

  “I was taking tickets at the theater in New Jersey. He kept buying tickets even though he wouldn’t go inside to see the show. He was much younger.”

  Robert laughs. “How much younger?”

  “A few years, I guess. But he seemed so much younger.” She is quiet awhile. “After the war, it amazed me that the world could still make young people.”

  Robert drapes quilts over her lap, adjusts the umbrella over her head. Leaves whisper in the trees. Little trapdoors open out in the lawn and close again.

  “I’m studying the war in college.”

  “Last year,” Esther says.

  “Next year, too,” he says. “I’m writing a big paper on it.”

  “I remember you didn’t like the way they taught it.”

  “At first it was all about armies and trea
ties and tanks,” Robert says. “Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt. Like it was ancient Egypt or something. Like it happened a really long time ago.”

  “History,” she says.

  “But you were alive for it. You remember it. That’s what my thesis is about, remember?”

  He waits but Esther doesn’t say anything more. He picks up his little recorder and presses a button and sets it back down. “Were you scared, Grandmom?”

  “Not of the things you might think.”

  “You mean like dying?”

  “Yes, like dying.”

  “So what things did scare you?”

  Esther tugs at her collar. Her glasses are smudged and her mouth is partly open and Robert cannot tell if she has more to say.

  18.

  In July sixteen more displaced people arrive at Hirschfeld House. Among the new faces are more Esther recognizes: a coach driver, a newspaper hawker, a furniture maker. A tobacco-starved grocer in creaking shoes. None of them seems to know what has happened to Dr. Rosenbaum.

  The weather turns hot. The house is unbearably crowded and there is not enough food. Toilets overflow; washrooms bulge and reek. Frau Cohen boils vats of sheets in the garden. Through the open attic windows Miriam and Esther imagine they can smell roasting goose, tomato soup, meals from long ago.

  Esther turns fifteen. She feels, all the time, as if she has some important appointment looming, the details of which she can no longer remember. Often she fails to answer questions that are put to her. More than once Regina Goldschmidt, directly in front of Esther, asks Frau Cohen to take Esther to the hospital.

  “We can’t keep her here any longer,” Regina says. “She’s getting worse.”

  Frau Cohen’s once thick arms are visibly thinning; her hair sits across her skull limp and gray. She clears her throat. “Regina—”

  “We can just tell a policeman,” Regina says. “Surely he’ll help us.”

  “Surely he won’t!” cries Miriam. “I’ll watch her. Let me take care of her.”