Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “She has forgotten,” says Commander. “Sometimes that can happen after trauma.”

  I pull my arm away and stand. I push the chair across the floor and run to the room. I lie on the bed and try and remember my home, but I can’t. I am picturing piles of rubble. I am losing the pictures. I can no longer remember all the colors there. I cannot picture my tata. It is as if they have vanished into dust.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ELSI

  Willem is hesitant to find a tutor for Matilda until she is settled. It has been three weeks since she arrived here, and we are still strangers. Since the first day she was here, she rarely speaks to me except to answer a direct question. I believe that she does not want her mother replaced. With Willem, however, she is less guarded. She asks him questions when he is home from the Center.

  Willem believes she has still not accepted the death of her family. To help Matilda deal with the awful truth, he has questioned Miriam to gain more information about the circumstances, but the woman has none. She believes that Matilda might be playing with us—that she is trying for sympathy. She also warned again that Matilda was difficult and would be impossible to tame. I do not believe much of what she says, though I am leaning toward her view concerning difficult to tame. Sometimes when Matilda finally meets my eyes, I see nothing but detachment. She does what I direct her to do, but that is all. She is a peculiar, unfathomable creature who does not respond to touch and is resistant to kind words.

  One day when I raised my arm to reach for something above her, she flinched and then quickly recovered. She was clearly embarrassed and hoping that I hadn’t seen this weakness. She has suffered at the hands of her vicious supervisor, at the hands of the German system. It is so very difficult to know what to do with her.

  Today we went to a store to buy her some clothes. There was a rack with several dresses her size. The shopkeeper said something to me, and I misunderstood her words. Matilda responded to her on my behalf, but she did not tell me what was said. Her German is better than mine, and she appears to enjoy this power that she holds over me.

  What has Willem done to me? I ask myself when Matilda and I sit across from each other at the table, no words passing between us.

  When Willem comes home from the Center, he asks about our day. I do not say that it was terrible, and Matilda says that it was well enough. It is like this day after day. I long for Sundays when Willem is here all day, when we picnic in the thick, soft grass on the hills that surround the town.

  Sometimes at night I see light coming from underneath Matilda’s bedroom door. One night I found her writing a story. She is always writing stories. I asked her if she could read me one of them, and she told me a story of Gypsies who were set on fire in the forests and whose souls wandered the earth, looking for revenge. This is the only time she has spoken more than a few words to me. But she could see this story shook me. I do not want to be reminded of horrors. At times it feels as if she is tormenting me, punishing me for replacing her mother.

  At lunch I serve her some soup, and she helps clean the kitchen afterward.

  “Matilda, I do not want to replace your mother, but I believe that we can live as a family. You can call me Mutti, Mama, or Elsi, and you can call Willem by his name, Vati, or Papa, whatever you wish. You do not need to call him Commander anymore. He is no longer your commander. Do you understand?”

  She does not respond.

  Willem falls asleep before we can talk. He is so tired, and even when he is there beside me he feels absent. He has been spending his days visiting the homes of potential adoptive parents, as he prefers to meet them away from the Center first, so as not to frighten the children. And he regularly drives a distance to another practice where he has to examine the pregnant or infertile Nazi wives.

  Matilda has locked herself inside her room and will not come out for lunch. It is as if she cannot hear me calling or knocking on the door. Only when Willem comes home does she come out to greet him. I am livid with anger.

  Willem bends down to place his arms around her, and she puts hers around him. I am jealous that she hates me, jealous that Willem has her affection and she has his. The two are made for each other. I leave the room.

  Willem comes to find me.

  “What is wrong?”

  “This isn’t working,” I say, not caring that I am emotional, that desperation has made my voice frail. “She hates me. We will never be a family, Willem.” I explain what she is like during the day. I have avoided telling him. I have avoided telling him that I am failing. I am missing the times we had together before Matilda.

  He takes me in his arms. “Elsi,” he whispers, and I sink against his chest. “In time it will be easier. Poor, dear Elsi. You are still so young . . .”

  I pull away. It is always that I am too young, too inexperienced!

  “What is the matter now?”

  “I just want you to understand that she is not easy.”

  “I do.”

  But he doesn’t. I do not think he is intentionally avoiding the truth; I believe that he thinks that I must become strong enough to cope with her.

  “I will talk to her.”

  Back in the sitting room, Matilda is waiting. She perhaps has heard my outburst. Willem is talking to her quietly, saying that she must respect me, the person who has dedicated time to her. She listens as she always does, soaking up the information without a response, without giving her thoughts away.

  “And what of Jacek?” she asks, interrupting the conversation. Willem seems relieved that she has asked.

  “Who?” he feigns forgetfulness, then continues playfully. “Oh yes. The boy formerly known as Ernest. Well, we have adopted him out.”

  Her body sags.

  “What’s the matter? Did he not want to be adopted?”

  “None of us did,” she says, her eyes briefly flickering toward me.

  It hurts a little to hear this, yet part of me understands. We are each making do.

  Willem says, “I suppose you would be happy to know that he is back with his parents now.”

  This is news to me, also. It is like this lately, learning information after everyone else. Willem forgets to tell me certain things, forgets that I want to hear everything. That his life is my life now.

  “His real parents?” she says skeptically.

  He puts his finger to his lips to signify that it is a secret. “Frau Haus would not be happy to know this,” he says.

  She nods. She is taking this very seriously.

  “The story has come true,” she says.

  “What story?” asks Willem.

  “It doesn’t matter. Only that some stories end happily and others don’t.” Her eyes dart toward me before returning to Willem.

  “Matilda,” says Willem, “if the situation was different—if your parents were alive—I would have returned you as well. So we should just make the best of things, yes? Elsi, my wife, is a good woman, and she will make a good mother. She is very kind. I will not let anything happen to you. No one will take you away again. Do you understand?”

  “Will I see Jacek again?”

  “One day, when it is safer, when the war is behind us, I will take you to visit. Perhaps Elsi can bake one of her orange cakes for the trip. She has been pestering me to take you to visit Jacek, but even if he was still at the Center, it would not be a good time to be doing this. I am too busy at the moment and often away from there.”

  Matilda looks past Willem to me, and this time her gaze is more curious than critical.

  I have asked Matilda about her memories before the Center, but I am met with silence every time. She stays in her room, drawing sometimes, but mostly creating pages and pages of stories written in German. I have had to ask Willem to bring home more paper. I have read some of them, and they are dark and detailed, though often there is a message in them about hope, about finding lost parents, animals, children. Of strange, fantastical cities where there is no war.

  Today we are off
to the market, and she is reluctant to leave the bed. I am determined that she will come. I have to use a forceful voice and threaten that there will be no dessert. Eventually she follows me, lagging behind, her eyes down—always eyes down when she doesn’t get her way.

  Matilda stands sullenly while I converse with the stall owners. We blend in here, as there are many other new arrivals who have left cities that were recently bombed.

  I am purchasing the last of the goods when I notice that Matilda is no longer beside me. Willem warned me that she had tried to escape before and perhaps still thinks about it. I wander around the busy stalls. There are lots of children here today, but none of them are Matilda.

  She is not at home, and I walk the streets, knock on several doors, then return to the markets. The thought of Willem’s and my secret being exposed is something that never leaves my mind. First I felt fear for myself, but the possibility of losing this strange little girl is just as worrying. I walk the low hills until finally I see the billowing white of her skirt. Matilda sits in the place where we picnicked above the valley. She is there with her writing papers and pencil.

  “Matilda,” I say, “how dare you run away!” My voice is shrill and brittle, even to my ears. I am not used to this stranger’s voice. She drives me to frustration and despair.

  She pretends that she doesn’t see or hear me, and I pull her forcibly to her feet.

  Then she throws her pages into the breeze—paper scattering across the grass—as she commences to stomp back down the hill.

  “Stop!” I say, but she ignores me and continues storming back to the house.

  “Stop!” I yell.

  “Shut up, you Polish slut,” she yells back to me.

  “What did you say?” I run toward her and grab her shoulder, turning her.

  She says it again, and I do the unthinkable. I slap her across the face, then retract my arm in horror at what I’ve done. After all the beatings she has endured, I am no better than any of my predecessors. I am a monster, also.

  Her mouth is open in shock, and she cradles her reddened cheek.

  “Matilda, I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes are not hateful. Rather, they look melancholy, as if she expected this would come eventually. I watch her thin legs carry her away from me. I have lost her now and may never get her back.

  “Wait!”

  I fall to my knees in the thick grass.

  “Matilda,” I call out, “we are alike, you and I. We were both taken by Nazis to places we didn’t ask to go. I, too, was imprisoned.”

  She is still walking but not as fast.

  “They killed my mother! They shot her in the head in front of me. They took my sister to the camp. She was your age.”

  She turns to look at me from under heavy lids.

  “Why did you hit me?”

  “You wouldn’t stop. What you said was very hurtful, and I’m tired of wanting you to like me.”

  She says nothing.

  “Matilda, if you stay with me, I promise you that I will never hit you again. It was wrong to do that. I will make it up to you.”

  She bites her lip and walks back toward me, though not all the way. She does not want to be too close and stops to sit down several yards away.

  I cross the narrow space between us and sit beside her. She looks wary at our closeness but doesn’t move away.

  I tell her that I am not whom I appear. I tell her about my past. I tell her about my life and family, about how it was before the ghetto. I tell her how Willem saved me. How I nearly went to the camps, that we have so much in common. I cry while I speak for some of it, until my mouth is too dry to talk. And then I look away. It is all that I can give. There is nothing more. If she goes, then I will accept that I have failed.

  It is then I feel her tiny hand on my leg, her fingers pressing gently into my flesh. She is not looking at me but across the rolling hills. I put my hand over hers, and we sit there for some time like that, both of us prolonging the closeness and stirring only once the shadows have replaced the streaks of light.

  Side by side, we walk down the hill.

  AUGUST

  CHAPTER FORTY

  WILLEM

  Father sent another message saying he wishes to have dinner with me. I travel to Berlin in the evening to meet him at an apartment that I have rented, the address now officially recorded as my permanent residence. I have made it appear that I am there much of the time when I am not at the Center: a coat on the back of the door, food in the refrigerator, cups and plates on the table. Some books and reports lie strewn across a reading table, along with opened mail. I have everything sent here. Father knows nothing of my other life, nor do I intend to tell him.

  “You should move closer to the Center,” he suggests over dinner. “It would be better if you didn’t drive so far each day.”

  I would prefer it if Elsi were sitting in front of me instead of him. She has lost weight again, due to the stress of coping with Matilda. Matilda is willful, but I have seen deep within her, where many can’t see. She feels vulnerable but is clever enough to hide it.

  Father says that he has heard reports that the children at the Center are becoming quickly Germanized, that I have employed excellent tutors and improved the athletics program. He does not agree with the decision to have the older girls transferred, but he understands that the new building will ultimately hold more young women. I do not tell him I have not yet commenced any work on the project. He says that he is pleased to hear of my dedication to treating the SS wives at the clinic, and says he received a letter from an officer commending me. My father is sounding proud of me, without the full truth, of course.

  “I will come and visit the Center soon and view the progress firsthand.”

  “Not yet,” I say. “I would like all the changes to be in place before you come. After the renovations. This is something I would like to do completely on my own.”

  My father views me carefully. “Very well. I can wait.”

  This life is a pretense. I wonder how long I can carry it.

  As long as it takes.

  “And how is your work, Father?”

  “We have made great progress. At the women’s camp the chemists have developed a drug that aborts the fetus up to the third month of pregnancy.”

  “And if administered beyond that?”

  “The baby also dies, but the situation is more serious for the mother. She will still have to deliver her baby, stillborn. It is not something we advise. Though we are currently testing that, too. Both genetics and the mother’s health at the time factor into the success of her recovery.”

  “So much disposal work to ensure race preservation,” I quip, but smile at the end of it to appear as if the lives of the test subjects mean little to me.

  “All these achievements are important, as you know. Each success in the laboratories and surgeries is another step toward the preservation of our German people. Your people, Willem. But I believe you understand that. You seem . . . different.”

  He is perhaps thinking that without Lena I will now become more like him, and I despise him for that. I do not question him on the validity of such experiments or the success rate of the drug. These are things I choose not to learn. Flashbacks of Auschwitz are rare now, but discussing the subject of testing with my father brings back thoughts I had cemented into the corners of my subconscious. One discussion with Father and the memories are seeping through cracks like poisonous gas.

  “The drug has also been tested for use in sterilization, but we are still conducting those trials. Early results show that one tablet per day over a course of a fortnight causes irreversible infertility. Regrettably, some women have reacted badly to the drug, while others, perhaps those who are more robust, have experienced few side effects.”

  The word regrettably when used by father refers to the failure of the experiment, rather than the mortality of the Jewish test subject.

  “At this point, it is not something that we would recommen
d in the short term, not for our German women,” continues Father. “However, ultimately, those women who have previously had complicated births and whose health is compromised by pregnancy will benefit from this.”

  Father retrieves a stout brown bottle from his briefcase and passes it to me across the dinner table. I suspect that it contains the tablets he is referring to.

  “What do you want me to do with them?”

  “There may come a time.”

  The truth of my father’s visit is surfacing. Always, my father has a motivation for seeing me, and regrettably it is not merely to check on my welfare.

  “Can you explain, Father, when you think that time will be? I look after German women now.”

  Father takes a sip of wine before he answers. He has aged, his hair more gray, face more pale, and the lines in his face perhaps deepened by the stress of his role.

  “Our boys in the field are not always as discreet or overly selective about the women they choose to lie with. You see firsthand the young women in need of obstetrics, and the Führer would hate to see centers like yours tarnished by . . . poor administration. I want you to make sure that there are no mistakes.”

  My father leans comfortably back into his chair. Poor administration: an interesting term meant to imply failure to carefully screen out foreigners. It is hard to believe what he is asking me to do, and it is hard to believe that we are of the same blood. Yet, at the same time I am thinking that my father is stripped of all things good, my mind turns to Lilli, and then to wonder if I might be the son he wanted after all.

  “I am not sure there will come a time,” I rush to say, to distract my train of thought. “Heinrich’s boys in the field have been doing an excellent job.”

  I hold his gaze, daring him to question the sincerity of my false statement.

  He looks at me down the center of his nose. He is a man I used to look up to, yet I do not feel anything for him. There is no shame to not love your own flesh and blood. As I have discovered, the people I value most in the world do not share mine.