Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “Yes.”

  She fired the pistol into Nurse’s head. It was over quickly, the first and only bullet causing Nurse to slump on the floor. I was shocked, but I cannot say I felt anything like sympathy. It was more of a regret that the spirits of death had claimed another soul. Catarina had always frightened her children with stories about death: not just about the act of dying but about the punishments that we would suffer after we died. Though my brothers would tease me with her stories, I am certain that Dragos believed none of it, and Theo learned to ignore her. But I had believed and feared every word. With Elsi’s help I have since made peace with the God I once feared.

  One of the older girls then began to wail fearfully, and Elsi had to remind them that they were safe.

  I don’t believe Nurse Claudia was evil, but I do believe she would have killed me if Frau had instructed her to. Nurse had been neither kind nor brutal toward me, and in the days after she was shot, I was still shaken by images from the commander’s room. But Nurse had turned a blind eye to children being abused, and would have continued to do so, and by association in Elsi’s eyes, she was as guilty as Frau Haus. Had we left her alive, I believe that under questioning she would have reported our presence in the area, and we would have been found.

  Recovering from the shock of the shootings, the older girls came to understand they were being saved, and they helped us drag the bodies outside. One of them kicked the commander in the head even though he was dead. Elsi told us to wait outside while she spread gasoline around the house, in the bedroom and on the landing and stairs—anywhere there was blood. She set fire to the bottom of the stairs, then came outside.

  We wrapped the bodies of the nurse and commander in rugs, dragged them into the woods, and buried them. Elsi wanted no remains to be found in the house, to leave no trace of their existence. That seemed to her the worst possible punishment. The children had not moved from where I had left them.

  When we returned home, Leon was waiting for us with another vehicle. He drove us north to our new house, and he then took the two children and older girls on to another location. He did not say where he was going, and we didn’t ask. We just had to hope that they would be safe. We would never see any of them again. Elsi told me later than Leon was not his real name, and that he was planning to move his resistance operation to another town, fearing that he was close to being discovered by the German police.

  When we arrived at our new house in the early hours of the morning, Elsi opened it with the key Willem had left for her in an envelope, and we stepped inside into our new lives. As her belly grew, Elsi and I lost much of our anger. Once the war was over, we discovered that we no longer had to fear life so much, and that we could move past much of what we’d been through if we just believed that the worst was behind us. Elsi said that we must dwell on the future. She said that Willem had taught her that.

  Tall grass brushes our car as it follows a muddy track between watery trenches. We have passed many towns where buildings still sit broken by war, funds not yet raised to rebuild. It is barely recognizable as the place I once knew.

  Fraulein Janz has to pull over to the side of the road in a gully to allow a truck carrying timber to pass. Mud streaks our windows as it passes. At the end of the track sits Catarina’s house. Piles of wood and tin lie beside it untidily. The sound of grinding comes from the factory behind it.

  The front door opens as I walk toward it. Catarina stands in the doorway, waving at me and barking something through the doorway to whoever is inside. Two tall young men appear beside her, their faces eager.

  I hug Catarina, this stranger who looks very small to me now, although I recognize the sharp eyes and the bony hands that were strong and used to hard work. She hugs me quickly, just as she used to, as if it weakens us to hold for too long. Dragos takes me in his bear arms and does not want to let me go. He is as I vaguely remember, though there are lines of adult worry now in his face. And Theo is there, blubbering, nearly beside himself with sadness at my arrival, at our long separation. I do not shed tears, though it is good to see them. I love them still, of course. But they feel like relatives I might visit, not ones I am about to move in with permanently.

  Inside, it all looks smaller now. There is a large hole in the far side of the house that leads into another room only partially built. Unfastened wooden frames lean against the walls of the construction as a temporary barrier against the elements until it is completed. Dragos introduces me to his wife and baby. I am told that I have to sleep on a mattress on the floor until they build the new room.

  Catarina is talking about her plans to build a poultry farm. She does not ask about the missing years. She has always been about the here and now. Although I’m sure that Theo will ask me about this later, when we are alone. Already his eyes are searching mine, looking for clues as to why I appear so altered.

  “Your clothes are so fine,” says Catarina in her native tongue. “It must have been a nice place. Well, nice places are not for everyone, I suppose. I’ve gotten used to our little house now.”

  Fraulein Janz discusses some formalities with Catarina: documents that have everything to do with me but nothing I want any part of. And then I walk Gilda to the car, perhaps just to give me some air. It is crowded inside the house.

  Fraulein Janz takes a sideways look at me. She is not so bad. She almost looks apologetic. There are so many ironies I don’t know where to begin.

  “They seem nice.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Your brothers are so happy to have you back, especially Theo.”

  “Yes, we were always close.”

  We stand near Gilda’s car. She scans the hills, the road, the factory, before her eyes rest on me. She seems reluctant to go.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” she says. “Now that I know that the children died, and others are untraceable, I will not be spending years searching for them. I will mark the Center files closed. And I promise you—this will not go on record. Some stories are best not told.”

  I nod.

  “And, Matilda,” says Fraulein Janz, taking my hand and squeezing it gently, “you will be all right. You can do anything you like in a couple of years. You can go wherever you want.”

  “I know,” I say.

  And I will.

  Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.

  —Sophie Scholl

  1996

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  NATHANIAL

  I did not learn of Mum’s story for years, about a father never spoken of, absent from everything in my life—mysterious, foreign, perhaps dangerous. I had never questioned why there was never any shortage of funds. Money held in my mother’s name, Elsi Winthur, a gift from my father before he died. And with this she had done so much for others. When her children had grown, she had fostered others, had two houses built, safe houses for the homeless, and she had volunteered at various charities. There were many she had touched and influenced, and they came to her funeral from all over the country. Mum would have been shocked, embarrassed. It was perhaps good that she couldn’t see the fuss, the grief she had left behind.

  We left Germany for Australia in 1949. As I later discovered, she wanted to be as far from Germany as possible. Knocks on the door filled her with fear. Shortly after I turned nine, Mum married Malcolm, my Australian stepfather, who came to us undamaged and died without regret: a schoolteacher whose sole ambition it was to make a home feel like one. He’d had a family intact and no stories of war. He had made life feel normal, easy. He had given me a feeling of freedom, of not wanting so much control. He taught us both not to fear strangers.

  Not that Mum hadn’t tried hard to make a good home; it was just that she took life too seriously. Everything structured, as if we were fenced, the outside world too great to navigate. I think it was these years with my stepfather that influenced me the most. He had taken us
on beach holidays, shown us large family Christmases with my stepaunties and stepuncles. He had taught me how to fish and to surf, to whistle. And while this was going on, Mum still made everything happen: house cleaned, food on the table, children raised with manners and love. Our house was balanced. And with three younger siblings to add to our family, we became like everyone else. I liked that. I was no longer the strange foreign boy with the mother who preferred not to come to the school, avoiding teacher interviews. During those first years in Australia, Mum was suspicious of everyone.

  Then Malcolm died suddenly, natural causes. It hit us all hard. I was about to turn sixteen. I was ready to learn to drive my first car. Mum and I were then left to raise the younger ones. And it was after his death that the nightmares came for Mum. A delayed reaction to everything that had happened in her life.

  All decisions seemed to fall on me, as if I had suddenly morphed into an oracle overnight. I missed Malcolm more than anyone, but no one seemed to care about that. The needs of my young siblings were shared between us, and my mother had also begun to assist with charity work, which kept her fully occupied. She was manic during the day, and panic attacked her at night. Home became unbearable, and I resented the responsibilities that now fell on me.

  At seventeen, when I thought she had been through the worst of her nightmares, I packed a bag and disappeared to join the league of drifters and misfits, finding odd jobs in various towns, picking fruit and cleaning motels. Then finding several months of solace in an outback commune, erasing brain cells with weed; sleeping in tents, sleeping with anyone; dressed most days in dust, dungarees, and a leather choker; and washing in ice-cold rock pools—all this in an attempt to “find myself.”

  It was not until I returned home a year later, disconnected from life, that I learned the whole story of my beginnings. My mother had seen that I was disillusioned, unable to find a peaceful place in my head. Unable to find the starting blocks for a successful life.

  “Nathanial, you are a consequence of history and its turns.” She had sat me down and told me the whole story. It was the first time she’d ever told it in full; other shortened versions had not included in detail my father’s role in war. It seemed so unbelievable in the civilized world that I lived in. But one day after she was diagnosed with her illness, Mum asked me if I could brush and pin back her hair while she gazed, from her usual spot, across the soft bed of treetops that eventually reached the sea. The radiation therapy was making her sleepy as well, and some days she could not find the strength to lift her arms.

  I ran the comb through the fine white hair, and much of her DNA came away with each stroke. Beneath the thinning strands I saw a scar across the top of her head and remembered the story of her in the ghetto prison. It wasn’t so much that I never believed what she told me, but up until that point—until I saw the evidence of such unbridled violence—such a story seemed too extreme to be real.

  In that small scar I saw my mother’s early life play out before my eyes. I saw the terror, the pain, the loss. I saw a broken soul that had been forced to mend itself and bend into someone else for the sake of others. It was as if a doorway suddenly opened, and I could feel something of what she had been through. I felt her. Her blood, which had carried her suffering, rushed through my veins, and her memories were suddenly alive in me, as if they were my own. I was overwhelmed with sadness.

  She had felt me stop combing and turned her head slightly. Sensing that I had somehow broken, too, in that moment, she reached behind to hold my hand. A grown man then on his knees wept into her lap. I didn’t have to say anything as she gently stroked my head. She had known—perhaps she had been waiting for the moment when I would truly understand.

  She had wanted only a plaque. She did not need “a pompous headstone.” I did not heed her request.

  Her story is now left to us, her family, to share and discuss among ourselves. And one day for the grandchildren, also, when they are old enough to appreciate their beginnings. “We raised you well,” said my mother before she died. And I have often wondered whom she meant by we. I believe it was Malcolm, although when the nightmares came, it was always Willem she would call to.

  I tried to find Matilda even though my mother asked me not to. “To let sleeping dogs sleep,” she said. (Her attempts at clichés were often hampered by a slight language barrier.) The description of Matilda’s home, vague from my mother, and with a surname she never knew. My mother kept a grainy newspaper article about her, and a separate photograph of her taken at the same time. In the picture, Matilda holds a certificate for a writing competition at school: socks around her ankles, hair escaping her plaits, and appearing more interested in something else to the right of the camera than the black box in front of her. Her story about a child who runs an orphanage for abandoned animals, considered clever and inspiring, was later published in a magazine.

  Matilda never tried to contact Mum either in the years that followed, though Mum told me she would check the letter box every day in hope. I believe that they were together for a reason, that it was not the separation that we should dwell on but the time they had together to build again, to gather strength from each other.

  After the war Mum learned that her own father had died in a labor camp several months after he had left the ghetto, and my aunt Leah never made it to any camp, dying on one of the notorious gassing trucks after she left the ghetto. But by then, my mother said, she had accepted the fact and had already been grieving them for years.

  I don’t feel connected with Willem, my biological father, in the sense that I understand him, but sometimes I feel him in me. He is there, they both are, and I will carry on what he and my mother started. I will endeavor to find peace, which is what they had been searching for when they first met. Mum believes that my love of writing stories, factual and biographical, came from Matilda. She believes that everyone we meet influences us, that we need to hear their stories to learn more about ourselves.

  It wasn’t the smoking that killed Mum in the end, although Clara and Louisa nagged her persistently to quit and kept the grandchildren out of the smoke. I remember Mum quipping, “You want to see smoke? You should live with a war.” Though the fact itself was serious, we had all burst into laughter at this comment, at the words she used, at her comical attempts to counter attacks. Even Mum saw the funny side that day. Mum had later agreed to smoke outside the house, though it was too late for me. It is when I go outside and sit on the wide veranda to light up a cigarette and observe the mountains and their various moods of blue that I feel closest to her. It is where we shared so many conversations, where she offered so much advice. And then the many times we sat there without words, comfortable with the silence.

  And now it is my turn to be nagged by Clara as I drive her and the girls to the airport, the others gone quickly after the funeral and back to their lives. Find a partner, stop smoking, get a real job, settle down. Stop being such a hermit. Clara doesn’t count writing novellas and magazine articles as a real job.

  “Whatever you choose to do with your life” was one of Mum’s favorite sayings. She never interfered with our career decisions. I am filled with gratitude for the life she gave us.

  I hug each of the grandchildren, pull their noses, make their toys magically disappear behind my back. Then Clara says to me as she hugs me good-bye, “Aren’t you lonely up there in the mountains?”

  “Raise your children well,” I say, cheekily deflecting the comment and using the term my mother always said to my siblings after the birth of each grandchild. A term they were at first annoyed by and then got used to. I punch Clara in the arm playfully, and she punches me back harder. She was always competitive.

  I wave good-bye and look forward to the drive home, to watch the sinking sun flickering through the trees.

  Are you lonely, darling boy?

  The letter box protests when I open it, aging, like all of us, arthritic, guarding the entry for more than forty years. An envelope, with an airmail stamp o
n the front, is addressed to me with the name “Lederberg” on the reverse, the handwriting decisive, letters tall and fearless. I unfold the typewritten letter inside and have finished the contents by the time I walk the long driveway back to the house and my bottom reaches its favorite chair on the veranda.

  I dab at the tears welling even though I find myself smiling at nothing, perhaps because the last chapter has finally closed. I calculate the time in New York before dialing the number listed at the bottom.

  No, Mum. I’m not lonely. There are too many people inside of me, too many from my past to ever feel lonely.

  The sun still shines.

  ―Sophie Scholl

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Dear Mr. Morley,

  I read your story about your mother published recently in a Jewish newsletter that we subscribe to. It was a beautiful story but even more beautiful to me because I believe that I knew her well. If Elsi Winthur is indeed your mother’s former name—and I am fairly certain I have the right person, since the name and the story would be miraculously coincidental—then I had the privilege of knowing you also.

  Firstly, let me tell you, Nathanial, that you were my brother for five years, that from the day you were born, I rarely let you out of my sight when I was at home. I spoilt you, and Elsi, my mother (at the time), had to tear me away from you many times. You were a bubbly, laughing child with the uncanny ability to find chocolate and other treats our mother went to great lengths to hide.

  From your story, it is obvious that you know some of my past, and I appreciate the fact that this piece, although it refers to me, does not mention my name. My story is one that I have chosen only to share with family.

  From the point in the story where you talk about my leaving, I can honestly say that my memories of the day I was led away from our little brick house—which always reminded me of the houses from fairy tales—have replayed in my mind many times. Elsi was a very strong person, and she and Willem Gerhardt, who you also mention (though not by his real name), undoubtedly saved my life.