by Karen White
Leo sat on the edge of his desk and looked sadly at Peter, who clasped his hands and fought the urge to stand at attention. He wished he had at least had the chance to remove his apron, stained with ketchup and Thousand Island dressing.
“Kid,” Leo said, “I gotta let you go.”
For a minute Peter didn’t comprehend this. He processed and reprocessed the translation—Let you go? Let go?—and all the while what flashed through his mind was an image of his daughter’s hand—Ginger’s, not Vivi’s—splayed like a star and winking white in the winter sun on the Grunewald freight yard platform.
“Pardon me,” Peter said finally. “I am not sure I understand.”
Leo gestured at Peter’s arm. “It’s that,” he said. “The customers don’t like it. It makes them uneasy.”
“Ach,” Peter said, instantly amending it to “Ah.” He remembered the way the woman—his mother’s Doppelgänger—had eyed his tattoo yesterday and rolled his sleeve down to hide it, the green mark like the bite of a very small animal trap on his skin.
“I am sorry, Leo,” he said. “I am not yet on shift, but—I will be more careful. I will keep my shirt like this—you see?”
Leo shook his head. “I wish it were that easy, kid,” he said, “but this just isn’t the place for you. If it had only been that lady yesterday—but this isn’t the first time I’ve had this complaint. A lot of our customers have said it disturbs their appetite. To think of—you know—while they’re eating.”
Peter’s ears grew hot as if Leo had boxed them—as the Adlon’s head chef had been fond of doing to clumsy inferiors. He stood trying to think what to say. His first impulse was to laugh, to point out to Leo the irony of people being put off their meals by the images of people who had died of starvation. Then he felt very, very tired. How weary he was of all of it, the long faces like the one Leo now wore, the expressions of sympathy when there was no way anyone who hadn’t been there could understand; of the forefingers loop-de-looping ears to signify Peter’s sorry mental state; of the pity, curiosity, revulsion. He was tired of understanding why the Americans were revolted. How well he understood.
“I see,” he said stiffly to Leo. “I will go now. I will not make more trouble for you.”
“Aw, don’t be that way, kid,” Leo said. “I’d keep you on if I could—as a cook, even, where people wouldn’t have to see your—arm. But then I’d have to let somebody else go to make room, and who would you want that to be? Big Al? Frankie? Lou?”
Peter shook his head. He took off his dirty apron and rolled it neatly into an oblong, setting it on Leo’s desk.
“You’ll make out all right, kid,” Leo said earnestly. “You’re a hard worker. I know you’re a good cook. And you’re one of the lucky ones—right? You survived everything those Nazi momzers threw at you and more. Puh puh puh.” He pantomimed spitting on the carpet. “You’ll do good for yourself, I know it. It just can’t be here.”
Peter nodded and Leo walked him to the door. He put a palm on Peter’s shoulder and handed him an envelope.
“Take care, kid,” he said.
7
Peter stepped out of the Oyster Bar onto the main concourse. He rolled his shirtsleeves up again, undid his tie, popped open the top button of his shirt. Now he knew what seeing his mother’s Doppelgänger yesterday had meant: meet one’s mother’s ghost, lose a job. Or maybe it meant they were catching up to him, his loved ones, even now, even here.
He opened the envelope Leo had handed him, more for something to do than out of any real curiosity, and drew out five crisp bills. Tens. Fifty dollars—that was, what was the slang for it? A lot of simoleons. At least, it would have been a great deal of money to a refugee not already bankrolled by Cousin Sol. Blood money, Peter thought, tucking it back in his pocket; a way for Leo to salve his conscience over letting Peter go. That was all right, though; whatever made Leo feel better was fine with Peter. He would miss Leo a little, and Big Al and the other cooks and servers and the job itself; it had been pleasant employment, certainly not as challenging as working on the line at the Adlon and far less demanding than Peter’s duties at Terezín, first as cook when he arrived in 1943, then, once he was reassigned, as grave digger, road-layer, and, finally, pallbearer, driving around and around the streets of the camp every day to pick up the dead—each weighing less than one of the Oyster Bar’s bus tubs—and loading them into the four-wheeled wagon and carting them to the crematorium. And that itself had been easier than Peter’s labor at Auschwitz—although to be fair, Peter had been transported to the latter camp on New Year’s Day 1945, only twenty-six days before liberation, when the SS were already as panicked and disorganized as ants whose hill had been kicked apart. So Peter had been spared the worst of it. As Sol’s tailor and doctor and friends and Leo and so many others in this new country had pointed out, Peter was lucky.
He looked around the concourse, wondering what to do now. It was just before one, hours before his language class would start. Peter could go to Cousin Sol’s office on Madison Avenue and confess what had happened—but he wouldn’t. He could go to the Larchmont house and—what would he do there? Peter pictured the immaculate rooms slumbering in the afternoon heat, the pool as undisturbed as a sleeping eye; Ines moving about the kitchen, clattering cutlery and crockery as she prepared the evening meal. Peter alone would be out of place. No, he wouldn’t go there.
He stepped out onto the concourse, drifting from column to column of light falling from the high semicircular windows. It was funny, that phrase he heard so often from Cousin Sol and others, that had been the title of the camps themselves from which people like Peter, if they were lucky, were plucked: Displaced Persons. You wouldn’t think such a thing would be so bothersome, to be displaced—although when you stopped to think about it, you realized the discomfort; if a bone were out of joint, it would hurt to walk on it, wouldn’t it? It would ache all the time. Peter navigated the circumference of the great room, sticking to the sides so as not to get in the way of these purposeful Americans in their clicking and clacking shoes, their hats and ties and lipsticks, each in such a determined hurry to get exactly where he knew he needed to go, and Peter felt like part of a toy his girls had been fond of, a cognitive gift his mother had given them for their first birthday. It was a board from which different shapes had been cut, square and circle and rectangle and wedge, with accompanying blocks that matched each; Vivi, ever patient and methodical, had quickly grown expert at putting the right piece into its counterpart space, but what Peter remembered now was Ginger banging and banging and banging a star against a square opening, increasingly red faced and frustrated as she tried, without success, to make it fit.
He passed a newspaper kiosk—averting his eyes—a shoeshine man kneeling before a bench with his brushes, vendors of sausages and bagels and pastries. It struck Peter every time, what a pity it was that he had so little appetite now that at any hour of day or night he could step up and, with the right money, buy whatever he wanted; only five months ago, one of Peter’s bunk mates at Auschwitz had in fact died of enthusiasm for food—devouring an entire chocolate bar provided by a well-meaning liberator, which proved too rich for the man’s starved stomach. Near a stairway leading downward, a violinist was playing something sad and sweet Peter recognized—Dvorák, the New World Symphony, the second movement. Despite his better instincts, Peter let himself be drawn over. He feared music now, though once he had loved it—anything classical especially, a preference about which Masha, who favored popular ballads and imported jazz, had teased him endlessly. My stodgy burgher, she had said, kissing his neck. My hopelessly old-fashioned husband . . . It had been his mother’s doing, Peter’s love of Brahms and Beethoven and Bach; Riva had whistled all these to him when he was a baby, dandling Peter on her lap, while he grabbed at her pursed lips and her long coils of hair—When I married your father, Riva often said, I could sit on my braids—and finally whistled back. Mus
ic had been Peter’s language before language, and he had taught it to Ginger and Vivi, too, bouncing a twin on each knee and whistling snatches from their favorite, Peter and the Wolf, which even Masha liked because Prokofiev was so modern, the girls clamoring always for the part they thought had been written specially for him, their very own father! Sing Peter, Papa, sing you, sing YOU! How they had loved the tune of the triumphant boy, the child hero who captured the forest beast and put him in the zoo, never realizing that in the end, the wolf would come for them instead.
The violinist—a schnorrer, Cousin Sol would have said, a beggar—glanced up, and Peter realized he was crying and jingling the change in his pockets. He took out the coins—all of them—tossed them in the musician’s red-lined case, and fled. Away. Away, away. He didn’t have to stay here, with Sol’s philanthropy and Esther’s solicitousness, on this precipitous edge of the continent where Peter was always in danger of tipping, slipping back into his memories; why, a good cook could go anywhere! He dashed across the concourse toward the ticket windows, feeling a sudden insane rise in spirits. He could go west, to a cowboy camp where he would stir beans in an iron cauldron over a fire. He could go to Montana, Idaho, the places where Cousin Sol went fly-fishing, and become a private chef in a rich man’s camp there. He could go even to Hollywood—why not?—all the way across the country, and flip burgers in a luncheonette, behind a counter at which more stars would be discovered. How Masha would love that, she who had been so entranced by that magic land known as Los Angeles that every morning at breakfast she read Peter snippets from her movie magazines, such as, Listen, Petel, it says here you can reach out your window in California and pick a lemon right off your own tree! Can you imagine? . . . Petel, did you know that in California it never snows? Masha who had so adored all American actresses that she had insisted on naming the girls Vivian and Ginger . . . Blindly, Peter blundered into a woman at the end of the ticket line and said, gasping, “Entschuldigung Sie!”
The woman, a pretty blonde in red lipstick, stared at him. She was wearing a thick coat far too warm for the terminal and carrying a carpetbag, and Peter thought at first she, too, must be a refugee. But no, look at her hair, bobbed like an American starlet’s. He had been right earlier, when he had left the Oyster Bar. They had caught up with him. He was seeing ghosts everywhere.
He took his place at the end of the line, head down and perspiring. The mad euphoria faded like a light going out, as Peter had known it would. He shuffled forward, mopping his forehead with one of Esther’s monogrammed handkerchiefs, and when he reached the ticket window at last he took the envelope Leo had given him, sweat-damp now, and pushed it across the counter to the startled vendor girl there and said, in English this time, “Surprise me.”
8
When Peter had the ticket in hand, he walked back out onto the concourse in the direction of the specific set of tracks toward which the salesgirl had pointed him. Sir, I don’t understand—you mean, you want me to choose? she had asked, and Peter had replied, Yes, anywhere, the destination does not matter, as long as the train departs very soon. At the turnstiles, he presented his ticket to the uniformed worker stationed there, and the man examined it and handed it back to Peter and told him to have a nice day. Peter assured him he would. He descended down, down, down an escalator, reminding him of the long, long throat of the Zoo Station U-Bahn in Berlin before it was bombed, and finally emerged with other travelers onto the platform.
There they all stood, some reading newspapers, others peering along the tracks to watch for the train. A trapped bird flapped overhead, seeking a way out, the sound of its wings echoing. Here was another thing that was funny: given Peter’s deportation to Terezín on the freight car and his second journey to Auschwitz, you’d expect him to be afraid of trains. But he wasn’t. In fact, until now he hadn’t given this mode of transport a second thought, and maybe that was because American railroads seemed so different from European ones, this platform not at all like the one on which he had stood with his wife and girls on that frigid day in the winter of 1942, in the Grunewald freight yard in Berlin, after spending two very cramped nights in the synagogue on Levetzowstraβe. That had been the first time his twins had been in a synagogue, since Peter was, like his father and much to his mother’s disappointment, nonobservant, and Masha was, of course, a Gentile. His girls, Vivian and Ginger, had been unimpressed by their introduction to the house of organized religion, which for them had consisted of dozing on Masha’s and Peter’s laps, squeezed onto the long wooden benches with three hundred other people, in a room so cold that despite all the bodies they could see their breath. It was cold the morning they left the synagogue, too, a fine, sunny, freezing dawn that had drawn lace on the windows when they departed; a cold like ice water poured through their coats as they walked to Grunewald, and that chattered his daughters’ teeth and reddened their small noses as they stood on the platform, so that Masha, who feared pneumonia above all after Peter’s mother had died from it, said, Petel, I need you to find Vivi a scarf. She’s lost hers somewhere and she’s shaking, and Peter had said, It’s not too late. You can still go. Take the girls home and contact my father’s friend for the papers. You’re Aryan and you know the girls can pass, and Masha, stooping to pull Vivi’s collar up over her face, her long blond hair swinging, said, Don’t start that again, Petel. We’re staying with you. Now would you just go find something warm to cover Vivi’s head? and Peter said, All right, Frau General, I’ll be right back. Still holding Ginger’s hand, he turned to scan the crowd for anyplace he might steal a scarf, and he spotted an elderly woman nearby, as bulky with furs as a raccoon. Surely she didn’t need that head scarf more than Vivi, did she? His father would have taken it, Peter was sure; would have slid it from the old lady’s head without a second’s debate. Don’t be so soft, boy, the world will eat you alive! But what if the old lady had spores in her lungs, like Peter’s mother, and his snatching the shawl was her death warrant? Peter dropped Ginger’s hand and was sidling toward the old woman nonetheless when the Nazis started them all moving, shoving them forward with truncheons and clubs, and there was mass confusion, shouting and screaming and heaving and pushing, and Peter was trying to shoulder his way back to his girls when he caught just a glimpse of Ginger’s hand winking white in the winter sunlight as she reached for him, calling Papa! and then his family was gone. Peter was pushed onto one train and they onto another, and it was not until after the war, first in Cousin Sol’s study when the man hung up the telephone and said heavily, I’m sorry but I have it on good authority, and then in the Red Cross office where Peter checked and checked and rechecked the lists, that while he, the lucky one, had gone to Terezín, a work camp, Masha and Ginger and Vivian had gone straight to Auschwitz.
The train was entering the station now, a vibration Peter felt in his stomach and feet. He studied the tracks. Was it only in the subway that there was a third rail that would electrocute you? If so, and there was no such thing here, was this train moving fast enough? No matter; if Peter jumped quickly and the engine rolled over him, it would crush him with its weight. He tensed his legs. Looked at the train, approaching. Looked at the rails, the litter-strewn cinders between them, chose his spot. Now. Now. Do it now. Sweat drenched his body; his thigh muscles trembled, as they had when he and his family took a cable car to the top of the Zugspitze and his girls had gamboled along the Alpine peaks like little goats in their summer frocks and Masha had beckoned to him, laughing, calling, Come on! but Peter’s legs had completely locked, and that night, lying beside Masha in their room at the hotel, his muscles ached so that he could not move them at all.
The train chuffed past inches from his face and stopped. Peter squeezed his eyes shut and more tears leaked out. People moved around him to get on, at first politely and then jostling and pushing as the train’s departure grew nearer. “What’s the holdup, pal?” they said, and, “Boy, that one’s more than a little happy.” It was too late. Peter could wai
t for the next train and the one after that; he could stand on this platform as a thousand trains came and went, but he would not be able to jump and join his loved ones because he was, as his father had said, soft; because he was, as Cousin Sol had pointed out, too weak, too passive and indecisive to be of good to anyone, let alone his family.
“Allllll abooooard!” the conductor called, and a man bumped Peter as he sprinted past, saying, “Hey, buddy, some of us have a train to catch, you know?” Peter apologized, in English. He opened his eyes and wiped his face. Then, as he had done all his life, he let the movement of others carry him; borne by strangers’ momentum, he stepped forward onto the train.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I once again thank the Holocaust survivors who granted me the tremendous privilege of recording their testimonies for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. I am also very much indebted to my Grand Central sisters, particularly Kristina McMorris, who originated this anthology; Cindy Hwang and the team at Berkley/Penguin Random House for bringing our novellas out into the world; and my superagent, Stéphanie Abou, who makes all things possible.
The Branch of Hazel
SARAH MCCOY
September 21, 1945
A baby cried. It echoed down the marble portico and up, up, to the vast ceiling of painted constellations. The titanic blue canopy, less like the airy skies over the Ardennes and more like the ocean. Weighted and one fault line from crushing her.
Cata’s breasts went wet with the sound of the child. She was glad she’d worn her winter coat despite the tepid weather of this New York. She’d given birth to a son the December before. A lifetime ago, a world away. He’d been taken in, adopted, by good people in Munich. A barren couple, the schoolteacher of her youngest brother. She was told they loved him. Of course, she thought, who wouldn’t love a boy like that? He was cherub-cheeked with large feet and hands that made the Lebensborn doctors nod with appreciation. He was perfect. Just like his mother, the nurses had said.
