Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  Frau Cohen runs her palms down her apron; she sends the girls away.

  Miriam and Esther move their cots to the attic. On July 26, four hundred and three English aircraft bomb Hamburg at midnight. Miriam and Esther watch from the attic windows. Spotlights spring up from points around the harbor. Hundreds of filaments of red light ascend from hidden gun emplacements. At their apexes the threads bloom into ganglia of red flak, white in their centers.

  Esther presses herself to the floor. “We should get downstairs,” she whispers.

  Miriam does not take her eyes from the window. “You can go.”

  All through Number 30 Papendam people wake and listen to the sirens and the pounding of the antiaircraft guns; they troop silently to the cellar and huddle together in the darkness.

  Esther stays with Miriam. Deliberately, almost lazily, the airplanes descend over the city. Bright streaks of tracer bullets come flashing up from the dark. The airplanes slip lower; they hold formation. At some signal bombs drizzle out of their bellies all at once: In a blink thousands of black spots are pouring through illuminated wedges of sky. The bombers scramble. The bombs fall diagonally.

  Esther thinks: Swarms of locusts. Flocks of birds.

  From their dormer windows the girls watch incendiaries fall through rooftops twenty blocks away and their casings open into light. White, phosphoric flames flow like water into gutters. Within seconds independent fires have linked up; soon entire houses are in flames. Above them clouds of smoke and ash bloom in harlequin colors: red, green, orange. Whole quarters of sky flare, then are sucked back into darkness. It feels to Esther as if she is staring up into a vast, electric brain. And from the brain little flaming sheets of paper and pillows and books and shingles rain slowly down over the city.

  She sees a golden pendulum swing through space. She hears a woman’s voice tell an old story: And the light broke over the world and it broke into a thousand thousand pieces, and these pieces fell into all events and all creatures.

  She wipes her eyes.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” whispers Miriam. “Schön, am schönsten.” Beautiful, the most beautiful.

  19.

  In Ohio seizures flow through Esther. A steady electrochemical pulsing washes up out of her temporal lobe and overtakes the coordinated firing of her consciousness. Her arms stiffen, her head falls back. The seizures no longer seem to impair her consciousness so much as amplify it. Through her right eye she can see Robert turn her on her side and hold her hand; through her left she watches shadows eclipse the trees.

  Maybe, she tells Robert, during her clearest moments, a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what’s happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration. Maybe that’s what Dr. Rosenbaum saw in her; maybe that’s what he was thinking as he stared into the white wardrobe that afternoon up in the attic of Number 30 Papendam: that there was something in her worth saving.

  Robert nods uneasily. He brings her soup; he brings her triangles of toast. He tells his parents Esther is doing better. He tells them she is as indestructible as ever.

  In seizures Esther watches Miriam walk the girls in groups through the abandoned city to the tall building with the radio mast on its roof. The girls look up at the flashing beacon at the very top and then they climb the long flights to the twentieth floor. Their voices come to Esther in the bathroom, in bed, on the deck in full daylight. She sits very quietly; the leaves rustle; she hears the faintest scratch of a girl’s voice, riding along beneath the breeze. She hears a little girl say, “But it’s not even hooked up.”

  “I’ll go,” a third voice says, suddenly amplified. “Papa worked in a furniture store. We lit candles on Fridays, kept the Sabbath. Even after I was sent to Hirschfeld House I thought everybody did the same. It wasn’t until I saw the signs and asked Frau Cohen what they meant that I knew we were Jewish.”

  Or: “Okay. Right. I had an uncle in the United States. When I was thirteen—this was years after my parents were gone—Frau Cohen wrote him a letter asking if he could sponsor a trip. For me. Whether he could find me a place to live, feed me, all that. Get me out of Hamburg. I told her not to write that he’d have to feed me. I told her to tell him I could find my own food. My uncle wrote back right away. Things are tight here, he wrote.”

  A long pause. Esther closes her eyes. She hears the voice say, “He didn’t know.”

  Sometimes she sees the girls above her garden. They trudge up a long, switchbacked staircase, the youngest holding the hands of the oldest; they sit up on the twentieth floor in the big square room, a quarter mile above Esther’s yard, taking their turns at the microphone, some of them lying down with their hands laced behind their heads, listening to the harbor wind streak through the broken windows, a hundred feet above the treetops.

  Esther whispers their names into the darkness of the backyard. Ellen, Bela, Regina, Hanelore, Anita, Zita, Inga, Gerda, Else, Miriam. Robert is at her elbow. “Tell me about them,” he says.

  “Anita Weiss had a lisp. She used to catch her tongue between her teeth. Zita could never keep the hair out of her eyes. Regina had a widow’s peak. The other girls said she was mean but I think she was always afraid. She didn’t trust that anything could be permanent.”

  “Who was your best friend?”

  “Miriam,” Esther murmurs. “I loved her. She was older than me. Just a few years younger than you are now.”

  Robert hands her a mug of tea. A minute passes, or an hour. Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.

  Robert’s parents call from China; they need a certain lawyer’s phone number; they need Robert to deliver something to his father’s office. They plan to be home by the fifth of July. They want to know if Robert needs them home sooner.

  “It’s not awful,” says Robert. “Being with her. It’s sort of amazing, actually.” He is quiet awhile; his mother breathes on the other end. “But I don’t know how much longer I can do it.”

  That afternoon he pulls a two-wheeled bike trailer made for children from the depths of his parents’ garage. He straps seat cushions inside, mounts it behind his bicycle; in the evening he helps Esther into the trailer and pulls her down their long street.

  They go slowly; he avoids traffic and hills. That night they ride for a full hour, through the dusk and into the moonlight, passing farms and occasional subdivisions, down the long, flat, rural roads of northeastern Ohio, maybe one car passing every ten minutes, and Esther feels as if she is being pedaled through a half-world of shimmering trees and fields and water towers and great flexing pools of shadow. In the distance, over Lake Erie, hazy thunderheads stack up in coral-colored towers. Robert pedals hard and with great seriousness, and Esther feels the blood pumping through her.

  “Are you comfortable, Grandmom?” Robert asks, turning around, panting.

  “More than you know,” Esther says.

  20.

  On July 28 the summons finally arrives for the Hirschfeld girls. The eagle and the cross on an envelope. No stamp. As if delivered from the office of God. Frau Cohen calls the girls from their various chores; they sit facing her while she unfolds her reading glasses.

  Around them a thousand houses in Hamburg smolder. Around them prisoners of war load bodies onto wagons and sailors drowse over their guns. In the garden behind the orphanage a former bank manager rakes between rows of cabbages.

  They are to travel on foot to a school gymnasium beside the Central Hotel. From there a deportation agent will escort them to the Ludwigslust railway station. There are long, meticulous lists of what it is advisable to bring—nightdresses, mittens, candles, shoe
polish, eyeglasses—and what is not advisable—rugs, plants, books, matches. There are directions for how everything should be labeled and conveyed; each girl is given a deportation number.

  Where, where, where. Regina Goldschmidt finally gets the question out first. The girls lean closer to hear the reply; several clamp their hands over their hearts. Frau Cohen flips through the papers.

  “Warsaw.”

  Esther tries to catch her breath. She has the sense that if she lets herself blink, she will see another world rippling beneath this one. Warsaw—how many times has she imagined Nancy Schwartzenberger’s life there? She tries to remember Frau Rosenbaum’s picture postcards. Old town. Wilanów Palace. The Vistula River.

  All afternoon the girls pack their things. Esther concentrates—candles, shoe polish, nightdress, arithmetic book. Underwear, birth certificate, thread. She thinks of Nancy Schwartzenberger sewing buttons. How old will Nancy be now? How exciting if they can manage to meet up with her!

  Maybe, Esther decides, they will have more space in Warsaw. Maybe there will be apothecaries with white gloves and loaded shelves.

  Auswanderung. The paths of the birds.

  At the other end of the attic nine-year-old Hanelore Goldschmidt besieges Miriam with questions: Will there be school? What about gymnastics? What kind of animals will they have? Will we be allowed to go to the zoo? Miriam goes downstairs, helps Hanelore choose among her few possessions. Before supper the girls carry their suitcases to the front door and leave them in a row with their tags bristling from the handles, all of it to be brought in wheelbarrows to the station in the morning.

  After prayers Esther and Miriam climb the staircase to the attic and push open the trapdoor. They lie down beside the big white wardrobe. The attic beams tick in the heat; spiders draw their webs between rafters.

  “Warsaw can’t be worse than this,” Esther says.

  Miriam says nothing.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  Miriam rolls onto her side. “The only thing I’ve learned so far, Esther,” she says, “is that things can always get worse.”

  Beside her friend in the attic that night Esther slips into dreams and when she comes back into herself it is very late. Not a single light shines out the window. Someone is walking hunched through the furniture around her. The figure stoops in front of the girls’ cots for a long moment. Watery breathing. Cracking knees. Miriam sleeps.

  “Dr. Rosenbaum?” He looks thinner than ever in the gloom of the attic.

  “Very quiet,” he whispers.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Shhh.”

  She thinks: He came to say goodbye. In the morning we’re leaving, so he came to say goodbye to me.

  “Your dress,” he says. “The coat, too.”

  She pulls on stockings, laces her shoes. Miriam does not stir. Esther follows Dr. Rosenbaum down five flights of stairs, past sleeping children and muttering crones and doomed men at last into the parlor, where he peers with all his attention through a gap in the curtains. Someone snores at the other end of the room. Someone else coughs.

  Are they leaving so early? Why not wait until morning? Every time she tries to ask him something, he hushes her. Out in the street the springs of a truck ring dully as its tires rattle across the cobbles. “The curfew—” Esther says, and Dr. Rosenbaum hisses, “Now,” and hurries her out of the house and through the gate. The truck’s headlights are not running and Papendam is very dark. The truck’s back swings open; inside is a void, a blankness out of which scared faces slowly bloom: The truckbed is stuffed with people.

  “Hurry,” says Dr. Rosenbaum.

  “But Miriam!” cries Esther. “My bag!”

  “Go,” says Dr. Rosenbaum, and pushes her in.

  21.

  Eleven murdered girls wake up on the floor of a tall, unremarkable rowhouse. Esther wakes in her bed in Ohio, her grandson asleep down the hall on the couch. Frau Cohen wakes at Number 30 Papendam in 1942, washes her face, and pulls on her cleanest housedress. She laces her shoes, pauses on the threshold of the kitchen, and sends up her requests to God. Please watch over us as we begin our journey. Please don’t let me falter.

  Within the wet enclosure of a single mind a person can fly from one decade to the next, one country to another, past to present, memory to imagination. Why Esther and not Miriam? Why not any of the others? Why did Dr. Rosenbaum choose her? Getting Esther out of Hamburg cost him everything: certainly all his money, perhaps his life. Was Esther the one good thing he could do, the one thing he could smuggle out?

  She wakes in a cottage in the woods. The ceiling is low and the furniture is roughhewn. Old pickaxes and sawblades and crampons are fixed haphazardly to the walls—the effect is of a rusting, historical suffocation. The cupboards are dens of superstition: filled with a putrescent reek, jars of dark elixirs, unlabeled pain remedies, molasses, crystals, something marked “belladonna,” something marked “trumpet of death.” Out the tiny windows hundreds of birch trunks gleam bone white against the dawn. A home to forest people involved in some dark, gnomish magic.

  In front of the cottage Dr. Rosenbaum is asleep on a log bench without a blanket to cover him. She fears he is dead but when she says his name he opens his eyes.

  “What happened?”

  “You seized. We brought you here.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Birds flit here and there, crying thinly. The sky is colorless.

  “I should be with them,” Esther whispers.

  “You’re tired,” Dr. Rosenbaum says. “This has been an ordeal.” As if this were it, as if now it were over. Esther hears herself whisper to Miriam, years before, in the darkness of the dormitory: I hope we are sent together.

  Dr. Rosenbaum smiles at her. “It’s best to stay inside.” She spends the day washing in and out of nightmares. Dr. Rosenbaum boils a pot of turnips; he sits with her and holds her hand. In the evening he hands her a letter handwritten in English, a sheaf of British pounds, and an address in London.

  “When the truck comes back,” he says, “I’ll return to Hamburg.”

  Esther’s vision swims with fear. “No. Please. Miriam. And the others.”

  Dr. Rosenbaum squeezes her hand between his two big, cold palms. “Where they are going, you do not want to go.”

  Esther tries to compose a sensible protest.

  “Go live your life, Esther.” An hour later he’s gone. She is picked up that night by a man with six other children riding in a trailer beneath a sheet of canvas; they ride together through the dawn. A boy whispers that they have entered Denmark; another argues they are going to Belgium. One of them has wet himself and soon their rocking, lightless compartment reeks of urine. At midmorning the man hides them in a windowless, dirt-floored, seven-by-seven cellar.

  They spend the next thirty-six hours there, a girl’s hip pressed into Esther’s shoulder, a young boy sniffling against her other side, the yelps of faraway dogs and the long silences of nightfall and the rumbles of airplanes passing far above. Rumors ripple between the children: They are being sent to Ireland, or England, or South America; a boy repeats, “We are going somewhere better,” over and over, as if saying it will make it so. Twice someone unlocks the door and pitches in a loaf of hard, dark bread and locks the door again.

  In that place Esther’s face is crammed up against a board and in the board is a large, dark knot. All through the daylight hours she stares into that knot and sweats into her nicest dress until there is no longer any water in her to sweat out. Over and over the words pass through Esther’s mind: I should be with them. She watches the Hirschfeld girls climb the stairs of a glowing palace in Warsaw. The doors open; the girls step into a white foyer. They stare up into the thousand glittering diamonds of a chandelier. Someone in uniform comes down a long staircase to greet them. The doors slowly close. The light fades.

  The cellar smells of sweat, hunger, terror, and human waste. The others know no more and no less. Whenever there is enough li
ght Esther stares into the knot of wood until its grains squirm with miniscule figures, carriages and trams, streetlamps and little coachmen dressed in velvet carrying whips, weathered houses and naked trees, and the more she stares into it she realizes it contains a dark city, alive, microscopic, teeming with people and rain and grime.

  Twice Esther has grand mal seizures down there in the darkness. Her legs rattle against the slatted walls as the others try to hold her still, someone’s hand clamped over her mouth, someone else holding her on her side. She sees Miriam Ingrid Bergen riding a train, peering out a window, one of the younger girls in her lap. She sees a family waiting out in the darkness.

  After the second day the children are smuggled to London onboard a fishing boat with guns newly welded to its bow. In Anglia, Esther shows a longshoreman her money and the letter from Dr. Rosenbaum. She is taken to a clinic where a man in a doctor’s coat gives her a set of secondhand clothes, a bottle of phenobarbital, and emigration papers for the United States.

  22.

  Inga Hoffman says, “There was a Jewish shoe store on Benderstrasse. The night they were breaking all the windows we watched a boy smash through the door and crawl inside. His father waited outside and when the boy came out with four pairs of shoes he looked down at the boy and scolded him. I thought he was scolding him for stealing but he was scolding him because one of the pairs he had taken had two right shoes. He sent the boy back in to correct the problem.” She tries a laugh but it comes across closer to a gasp.

  Little Zita Dettmann says, “Not everyone was mean to us. Two ladies left a crate of pastries on the front steps. Do you remember that? I put one in my mouth right away. Inside was strawberry jam. Strawberry jam!”

  An even smaller voice sings, One little goat, one little goat, which my father bought for two zuzim…

  Gerda Kopf says, “You hear stuff like your whole life passes in front of your eyes. But it’s not true. A life is really big, it contains a billion things, as many needles as there are on a pine tree. There’s no music, but there is a sound, like a far-off screech. Or smoke rising. Or like a woman inhaling a little, like she’s about to sing.”