“I didn’t need all that space just for me. And this is closer to my dad. And the water.” I open the door wider. “Come on in. It’s too hot out to stand there.”
Benjamin walks inside, and Lucky rushes him. He kneels down to pet her, and she licks his hand and he doesn’t pull back. I hadn’t pegged him as a dog person before now. “She’s new, too?” he says.
“She is. Whole new decade, whole new apartment, whole new dog, whole new job, whole new life.” I make room for him to sit on the couch by shoving a pile of laundry onto the coffee table. “You want a drink?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No, I’m good. I can’t stay. I just . . . I just wondered how you were doing, that’s all.”
“Today? It’s like a hundred million degrees outside.” I left that message back in December, and I’ve driven by his office or up to his neck of the woods a bunch of times since, hoping to run into him, wondering the same. I’ve just done it in nicer weather.
“You’re doing well,” he says, more to himself than to me.
I nod. I am, and I’m glad he can see it. “How about you?” I ask. “How have you been?”
Instead of answering he takes the seat I’d offered on the couch, and gives me a small smile, which I take to mean he’s doing well, too. “I guess the real reason I came over here is to tell you that I’m still looking into your stamp,” he says.
“Really?” I sit down next to him. “I mean I have been, too, I just thought you’d have other stamps to look into.”
“I do,” he says. “But your stamp was . . .”
“What?”
“Different,” he finally says, looking down at his feet. He doesn’t look back up right away, so I tell him that I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Elena. Jackie from the Holocaust Society suggested that I look through the microfiche of Red Cross lists at the UCLA library but I couldn’t find her name. I’ve also been corresponding with Dr. Grimes and he’s let me know East Germany is releasing some records from the wartime soon, once the reunification is final. We’re hoping Elena’s name or details about her story will be among them.
“I got in touch with some stamp dealers in Germany and Austria,” Benjamin says when I’m finished. “I kept thinking about the other letters. There were like fifteen or twenty of them, right? So what happened to them? Someone might have saved one somewhere. And now that Germany is reunifying . . . Well, I thought maybe one of our stamps would turn up over there. In the East even.”
“Sounds like a long shot,” I say, remembering what Jackie told me about sifting through the Holocaust information, looking for survivors.
He nods. “That’s why I didn’t tell you I was doing it.” So he was still looking, doing this for me, and trying to protect my feelings, too? “But then it paid off,” he says.
“You actually found one?” I forget to take a breath for a moment. There’s another stamp like ours, my father’s? Another connection to his past?
“Herr Jacobs, a dealer I contacted in Berlin—I received a letter from him this week. He said he has come across a similar stamp recently. That he has one in his possession. I want to go there in the fall,” Benjamin is saying. “More airlines are starting commercial air service into Berlin, or will be once the reunification is final. Then I can see Herr Jacobs and his stamp in person. And maybe we could see if we can look into those records the East is releasing while we’re there and see what we can find about Elena, too.” He stops talking, as if he got carried away, then catches himself on the word we. “I mean what I can find, while I’m there, sorry.”
“No,” I say. “I want to go to Germany, too. I’ll pay for my own ticket this time.” He smiles, as if remembering our trip to Wales, and I wonder if he thinks of it fondly, the way I do. “Just one thing,” I add. “Do you mind if Gram comes with us?”
Germany, 1990
EAST GERMANY, or I guess I should just say Germany, looks nothing like what I’d expected. The place that used to be Gram’s tiny village, Hertzscheimer, is now rolling farmland surrounded by green hills and forests about sixty kilometers east of Berlin in Brandenburg. We rent a car and Gram, Benjamin, and I drive out there on our first day in Germany. I’m expecting wreckage, disaster, but all I see is beauty: open grassy land, sheep grazing. It’s hard to imagine a village of Jews was here once, that it was destroyed, decimated, burned off the earth nearly fifty years ago. Or that the people who lived here since were contained behind a guarded brick wall, and kept isolated by the communism of the East for so many years.
We drive around for a little while, and Benjamin spots a Naturpark. I pull in and park the car. We all get out and walk on a wooded trail down to a small lake. Gram is wide-eyed, silent. She shivers from the chill in the fall air, colder than anything we’re used to in California. “I never thought I’d be here again,” she finally says.
“You’ve been here before?” I’m not sure if she means Germany, or the lake just in front of us. “This park?”
“Yes, sweetheart. Wo wir als kinder spielten.” Then she seems to remember herself, me, that I don’t understand her German. “Where we used to play as children,” she says. “I thought they would’ve destroyed it all, but it’s still schön . . . beautiful,” she says.
When we’re back in Berlin, at the Palasthotel, Gram goes up to our room to take a nap, and Benjamin and I decide to walk around the city for a few hours. We have an appointment to meet Herr Jacobs at four o’clock in what was once West Berlin, and Gram is going to come with us in case we need a translator. (Though Benjamin has spoken with Herr Jacobs on the phone once, and he says he speaks English, somewhat.) We’re staying in what used to be the GDR, East Berlin, in a hotel that once was reserved for distinguished guests and has only recently opened to Germans and tourists like us. The decor is so brown that the inside reminds me of a cave, despite the fact that the building itself is opulent, and the surrounding block could even be described as oddly charming.
We check the map; we want to go see the wall. It’s under three kilometers from the hotel, and the afternoon air is crisp. “It’ll feel good to walk,” I say when Benjamin asks if I think it’s too far to go on foot. I feel cooped up after the long flights, the time in the car this morning. I want to experience Berlin, the way Gram did once as a girl. I want to see and feel the breath of the city. We figure out a route, and we walk in silence.
After Benjamin showed up at my apartment in the summer, we haven’t talked much these past few months, other than to touch base about the details of the trip now and then. Gram needed to renew her passport, and we needed to figure out when it would be feasible and most affordable for us to fly. In the end we decided to wait for Lufthansa to begin commercial flights into Berlin again, once the official reunification had taken place. And so we’d discussed all that, intermittently, over the phone. But nothing else. I hadn’t asked him how he was doing, or how he feels about his third upcoming Thanksgiving without Sara and Davis. I don’t mention any of that on our walk either. At first, I’m not sure what to say, and then the silence between us begins to feel easy, comfortable. I don’t need to say anything at all.
We turn onto Oranienburger Strasse, and I notice the domed building that stands out from the modest brick buildings surrounding it. There’s a plaque next to the door, and a Star of David on it catches my eye. “A synagogue?” I say. I’m surprised, but maybe I shouldn’t be. The war was so long ago, but I’d always thought of Berlin, especially the East, as a city without Jews. I stop and walk up to look at the plaque. The writing’s in German, but I can understand enough to get the point. “This must’ve been destroyed in Kristallnacht,” I say. “Then rebuilt in 1966.” I trace the date at the bottom of the plaque with my fingers.
Benjamin wears a camera around his neck, and he lifts it up, snaps a picture of the plaque up close. He steps back and takes one of the building, the beautiful dome, me standing in front of it. “I’m going t
o print these for you when we get back,” he says. “You could write about this synagogue, for your magazine.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I say, trying to hide my surprise that Benjamin knows about my new job. I haven’t told him anything about it, other than the fact that I have one. Has he been checking up on me this past year, the way I’ve been checking up on him?
We keep walking, only stopping occasionally for Benjamin to photograph something. And when we get to the wall, we see it’s still in the process of coming down. Men are working on deconstructing it right now. There’s so much of the actual structure intact, which is surprising, given that it’s already been a year since the wall “fell.” It’s ugly; a cement and brick monstrosity. I remember the wall “woodpecker” we saw on TV last fall in Wales. The woman in the raincoat who’d hated the wall because it had kept her from her family, who chipped it away in tiny pieces with her pickax. Benjamin and I fell asleep holding hands that night, the sounds of the woman chipping away at the wall on the BBC in the background.
Today the sun is shining brightly; the park near the wall appears festive, colored leaves on all the trees. The only sound the noise of bulldozers, taking the wall apart, piece by piece.
Herr Jacobs’s office is in a tiny brick storefront on the other side of the wall, on Luisenstrasse, near the University of Berlin. The unassuming sign on the front of the building reads Philatelie, and even with my limited German, I know we’re in the right place.
We walk inside, and in an odd way it reminds me of Benjamin’s office. A small crowded desk, a tiny television propped on a corner. It’s funny that halfway around the world a stamp dealer is still a particular kind of person. Herr Jacobs walks out from the back when he hears us enter and he is much older than Benjamin, closer to Gram’s age. “Guten Tag,” he says, eyeing the three of us. His eyes come to rest on Gram, as if he can’t place who she is in this story, and I guess Benjamin didn’t mention her beforehand. But she’s the one who steps forward and begins to speak to him, without hesitation, in German.
“Ja, you are Americans?” he says back, in stilted English. “With flower picture?” I pull the plastic sleeve out of my bag to show him the letter. I point to the stamp and he pulls his spectacles from his head, and then examines the stamp through the plastic with the magnifier attached to one lens of his glasses. “Yes, it is same thing,” he says, after a few moments. “Hold there, please.”
He walks into the back and comes out a few minutes later with a newspaper. He looks through it, folds the page back, and hands it to me.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“You ask if see flower picture,” he says to Benjamin.
“Stamp.” Benjamin’s voice sounds measured, the way it always is. “I asked if you’d seen this stamp?”
Gram starts to speak in German, presumably to explain the confusion with his English.
“Ja,” he insists, shaking his finger at the newspaper. I look at it, and it’s all in German, but I appear to be looking at the Help Wanted section, or some kind of advertisements. Not news stories. He moves his finger down the page, and then he stops. “Flower picture.”
He’s pointing to a small drawing of a building, what seems to be the synagogue Benjamin and I saw this morning. I recognize the dome. And inside the dome is a tiny edelweiss, looking almost exactly like the edelweiss on our stamp, in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna. “What is this?” I ask.
Herr Jacobs shrugs, not understanding perhaps, and Gram tries to translate again. He says something back to her in German. She nods her head. “Ja, ja, ja,” she says excitedly.
“What?” I ask her.
“He says it is the Women’s Movement for Peace, a group of women from both sides of the wall who have been fighting for freedom and peace in Germany for years. They’re advertising their upcoming meeting. They always did it this way, in code, so the Stasi wouldn’t know.” He says something else in German and she says, “But now they still do it. That is their thing. The flower, that is their . . . symbol? Yes?”
“Ja,” Herr Jacobs says. “Flower is symbol.” He says a bit more in German.
“The flower is a code for where and when they will meet,” Gram says. “His wife is a member, or was. She passed away last year. But Herr Jacobs still notices the ads in the paper. For her.” She turns to look at him, seeming to recognize his sweetness in still remembering her that way.
But Herr Jacobs doesn’t seem to notice. “Flower picture,” Herr Jacobs says emphatically. “Flower stamp. Same artist, ja?”
“No, that’s impossible,” I say. “They can’t be the same artist.”
Herr Jacobs frowns and so does Benjamin. “Ja,” Herr Jacobs says, and he switches back into German once again, speaking rapidly.
“He says the lines . . . are the same,” Gram says, her face contorting with concentration. She’s struggling to keep up; he’s speaking so fast. “In both of the flowers. They have the same lines.”
“They’re both edelweiss,” I say. That’s why we’ve come all this way—Herr Jacobs had simply seen another edelweiss in another building, in an advertisement in a newspaper. I hand the paper back to Herr Jacobs. “Danke,” I say.
“No.” He pushes it back to me. “You keep. I have many others.”
We’re quiet on the way back to the hotel. I fold the newspaper, put it in my bag, and look out my window at the storefronts of Berlin. We drive through the Brandenburg Gate without stopping, and then just like that we’re back in the East.
“What do you make of it?” Gram says quietly from the backseat, as we drive by the synagogue. “I mean it is a little odd, isn’t it? Another edelweiss in another building. All these years later?”
I glance at Benjamin, who doesn’t react outwardly. He keeps his eyes trained on the road. I turn around and look at Gram. “I think it’s a coincidence,” I say, though as I say this I remember what Benjamin said that night in the car ride back from San Diego. He doesn’t believe in coincidences. I almost expect him to say that now, too, but he doesn’t. When I glance back at him, he’s staring at the street ahead, frowning.
“But to imagine,” Gram says. “If Gid and I had stayed and made it through the war. If I would’ve been stuck in the East. Would I have been brave enough to join this group, the Women’s Movement for Peace, do you think?”
“Of course you would’ve been,” I murmur.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I might have been too afraid of the Stasi. I don’t know,” she says again. She stops talking and watches out the window, as if picturing a whole other life.
Gram and I are sharing a room at the hotel, and Benjamin is just down the hall. Gram falls asleep early, but I’m wide-awake. I walk to the window and take in the view: a cathedral, all lit up in the night sky. In spite of the drab brown decor of the hotel, it really is beautiful here. But Benjamin told me that East Germans were never allowed to stay at Palasthotel before the wall fell, that the hotel hadn’t even accepted the local East German currency.
I think about the Women’s Movement for Peace, this group that secretly announces their meetings in plain sight by printing a small drawing in the local newspapers. My father’s story of hiding a flower in a stamp fifty years ago, trying to escape the Nazis, mirrors this group of women in my lifetime, advocating peace in the face of danger and threat from the Stasi. Women who are probably not that different from me, had my family gotten stuck in East Germany, behind the wall.
Proof of unusual daring, my father had said of the edelweiss, and maybe it is just the same here today.
There’s a soft rap at the door, and I hurry over and look through the peephole. Benjamin stands in the hallway on the other side. I grab my key and open the door.
“I knew you’d be awake.” He offers me a half smile. “I wanted to look at the paper again.”
“Gram’s sleeping. Hold on.” I grab the paper from my bag, sl
ip out into the hallway, and shut the door behind me.
We walk the few doors down to his room, and inside it’s identical to mine and Gram’s, all brown. He takes the paper from me, and I walk over to his window. He’s on the other side of the hallway, so no view of the cathedral, only a view of the building behind us, and all I can see is darkness.
“I agree with him,” Benjamin says.
“What?” I turn back around. Benjamin is sitting on the edge of the bed, and I sit next to him. Our shoulders touch, but neither one of us moves away.
“The lines are the same. It does look like the same artist.”
“But it can’t be,” I say. “My father’s thousands of miles away in the Willows.”
“I know. But I don’t think Herr Jacobs brought us here on a wild-goose chase. I mean what if . . .” His voice trails off.
“What if what?”
“What if someone involved with this organization knew about your father’s stamp, maybe has one or received one once? Then copied it somehow?”
“I get it. You don’t believe in coincidences,” I say. “But maybe the edelweiss isn’t a coincidence. It’s an important flower in this part of the world. In Germany and Austria.”
“Maybe,” Benjamin says. He points to the bottom of the picture, at the numbers inscribed beneath it. “Herr Jacobs said it was a symbol for where and when. Look at the numbers here below the picture.”
I look—10239015—and try to make a quick conversion to military time in my head. “Tomorrow at three?”
“We should go,” Benjamin says. “Bring our stamp. Ask if any of the women have seen it before.”
We’d planned on going to the records ministry tomorrow, trying to search the newly released public records for any mention of Elena, but Benjamin seems so eager to do this instead. And I have to admit I’m curious about these women, too, edelweiss or no, and so I agree with him.
The Lost Letter Page 23
