“What did you tell him?” I ask Papa, with Hansi tugging on my arm.
“Just that Mama will be all right, because even if the worst happens, she’ll be with God.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing, of course.” For a moment, I’d forgotten that he doesn’t talk. And Papa hasn’t learned much sign language yet.
My father thinks the Christian God is a hoax, though he doesn’t say so aloud any longer. But maybe Hansi keeps altars and incense in his universe. If so, and if the Lord really appears to us as what we find most beautiful, then my brother must pray to a giant squirrel—the red-furred, tufted-eared, long-tailed variety that we find all over the Grünewald and Tiergarten. Sciurus Vulgaris—a god who knows where every nut in the world is hidden.
And maybe Sciurus Vulgaris creates a miracle for us from up there at the top of the Hansi Tree, because Mama’s health improves and she starts being able to cook, which isn’t such good news, in truth, because that means we’re back in boiled-potatoland. I help her every evening. We talk about dresses, my friends in the Young Maidens, and our favorite movie stars, since that makes us both feel as if we’re safely in our past. I gab for hours, quick as I can, because this period of grace probably won’t last much longer; when she gets all better, she’ll turn back into the narrow-minded victim of circumstance who sees only willfulness and defiance crouching in her daughter’s eyes. Mama listens to me as she never did before, as though the death that was growing in her belly has taught her to treasure my run-on sentences and convoluted fantasies. When I say I don’t have time for the Young Maidens any more, she replies, “Then quit.” And when I tell her I intend to go to art school in a year and a half, when I finish high school, she tells me, “It’s your life, Sophie. If that’s what you want, then don’t let anyone dissuade you.”
I feel like poking my finger into her arm to make sure she’s real.
Was she dissuaded from going to college herself? Maybe I’m just reading once-upon-a-time, secret ambitions into the way she says, “You’ll make something of yourself, Sophie. I know it.”
I almost ask her about what went wrong when she was my age, but then I think, No, this is a fragile balance we’ve achieved on our seesaw, and she will either tell me or she won’t. Yet if I were to extrapolate on the advice she gave me over those weeks of relative health, I’d say she always felt rejected. Except by a high school history teacher who suggested that she become a nurse. When she speaks of Hilde van Loewen, a Dutchwoman from Rotterdam, her eyes become radiant. A golden age that’s gone.
She also tells me once that her father was “a hard man.” She shakes her head when she says the word hard as if she means cruel. Speaking of him, her shoulders hunch and she becomes a beaten young woman again, cowering in front of an unforgiving, hardfisted taskmaster. I also learn he never wanted her, because she tells me, “He’d have killed to have a son instead of me.”
When, contrary to my expectations, she warns me about marrying Tonio too young, to wait until I am twenty-one, I get the distinct feeling that she agreed to wed Papa simply to get out of her father’s house. She escaped from one jail to another. I read that in the way she warns me not to have a big wedding. “Just the people you really trust,” she advises me, “because the rest won’t help when you really need to change your life.”
Once, she whispers to me conspiratorially, “The year you were sick with whooping cough, when Hansi was only a year old, your father didn’t lift a finger to help me. He fled the house. I could never forgive him for that. I tried, but I couldn’t do it.” She instructs me then not to have children until I know my husband very well.
If we had enough time together, I think I’d learn all of Mama’s secrets by gleaning tidbits here and there, but in late July, she gets a high fever that won’t come down. So back she goes into the hospital.
Her mother arrives by train from Bavaria the next day, and both of Mama’s sisters, Ilse and Angela, come in over the next week. Grandma is a quail of a woman with a bun of wavy, steel-gray hair; thin, judgmental lips; and a haughty glare. If we were living in China she’d be a dowager empress, but this is Berlin and she has no servants to order around except me, which means I have to fetch her tea, iron her pillowcases, and fluff her eiderdown. Her green eyes are constantly moist, and she clears her throat noisily after each meal, which grates on Papa’s nerves. She sleeps in my bed, dressed in a floor-length, pink-lace nightgown that looks like it would be just the thing for Marie Antoinette, and I take the couch. When I ask her why Grandpa didn’t join her, she says he hasn’t been well for years. “What’s he got?” I ask, and she sticks her finger into her temple and turns.
Our aunts talk too loudly, stink of cheap lemon perfume, and fuss with Hansi as if he’s a doll they’ve inherited. I can see why Mama dislikes them, though she never actually says that. Papa charges out of the room like a spooked stallion whenever they come over. He reads the paper and smokes cigarettes with his window open so the smell won’t give him away.
Hansi isn’t able to sleep soundly in the same room with our grandmother—probably because his snoring creates a dissonance with her higher-pitched honking—and when I wake during his first night with her, I find my brother seated on his heels in front of the fish tank, shivering, wearing only his pajama bottoms. I can tell from his swollen-looking eyes that he’s been crying a lot. When I snuggle with him and ask what’s the matter, he points to the tank. As usual, Groucho is munching on poor Harpo’s fins, which look like a shredded fringe of white satin. “What should we do?” I ask.
Hansi stands up, grabs our tiny net, and scoops the bully out of the water and drops him on the floor. “No good!” he signs to me with a swift downward motion of his hand.
Groucho flails around, blood-red gills flexing madly. It’s horrid to watch, so I lift him by his tail, go the bathroom, and flush him down the toilet. By now, Berlin’s sewers must be a frenzied knot of discarded goldfish and guppies. Good for feeding the albino, mutant crocodiles rumored to live down there.
Hansi and I go back to watching Harpo. Will his fins grow back? “Let’s buy a Chico for him,” I say, and my brother gives me a big happy nod. Such an easy boy to please.
Hospital tests reveal that Mama has an abscess in her lungs, and her doctors stick tubes into her chest to draw out the fluid. Her face becomes gray and pasty—like wax. Still, she asks me to draw her one afternoon, which stuns me. By way of explanation, she tells me, “I want one person to really see me. And it has to be you.”
A desire I will always remember. Because she spoke it so desperately, as if I were her link to what might have been and what could still be. Because there is still hope in her words.
I want one person to really see me. Who wouldn’t want that? She must have concluded that I knew nothing essential about her—and that nobody else did either, not even Papa. Which means she lived like a ghost, talking in an imposter’s voice. How many of the German women I see every day in the street go through their lives like that, pecked at by bullies and giving up the struggle?
Not me, not me, not me … That’s what I vow while drawing Mama.
I was just seventeen. Now, I realize that it wasn’t my responsibility to know who my mother was, or why she was misunderstood, or what happened between her and her sadistic, crazy father, but at the time her words hit me like a slap across the face.
She stares at me the whole time I sketch her. With eyes like water on the surface of a deep lake. Does she see cragged, snow-capped mountains around her? She told me that the Alps appear to her in her nightmares of late, and when I asked her why, she bit her lip, ashamed, and said, “Because I can’t see over them.”
She is a thirty-seven-year-old woman who wants more time and who needs to be sure her children love her. That’s what her unblinking green eyes say to me. And what do mine say to her? She must know I’m terrified, but she doesn’t reach out a hand to comfort me. She wants tremors to shake my hands. Is that cruel? Maybe it gratifies
her to see me distraught because it signifies that we both want her to go on living. “Thank you for your tears,” she once told me toward the end, squeezing my hand so tight it hurt, and I understood just what she meant.
She is a woman, not just a mother, and her life is not a dream. She has emotions she cannot explain, feelings no different from any of us.
Those are conclusions that should have been obvious to me but weren’t. And this woman before me, who wanted to be a nurse and who was fettered to me when she was only twenty, will die before her time. That is what I realize, sick with guilt, as I add shading to her cheeks in my sketch and try to keep from jabbing my pencil through the paper.
I never finish my portrait. How could a drawing of a dying mother ever really be done? No, I keep that sketch in my head even now. When I show her what I’ve done, she studies it carefully, biting her lip again, which is something she does nearly all the time now.
“It’s not very good,” I say, “but I really tried. I tried hard, Mama, I promise.” I don’t want her to die hating me for not being a good enough artist, and every word I say really means, Please forgive me for being born too soon …
“No, it is good. It’s just that my face … that face … it’s not the one I thought I had,” she tells me.
After a few more days, we take Mama home again from the hospital. Her mother and sisters return to Bavaria the next day. Mama doesn’t shed a single tear during their good-byes.
For a week all is quiet, but one evening Mama goes through her cookbooks to find the piece of paper on which her mother wrote her recipe for Knödel, potato dumplings. She knocks everything from our pantry onto the floor during her frantic search, shrieking, “It’s gone, it’s gone … !” Her nightgown comes undone, so she’s half naked, too. A shrieking skeleton with lost eyes. When I beg her to stop, she pulls at her tufts of hair over her ears and screams, “I hate you! I hate all of you!”
Papa comes in and tries to get her to calm down, but she pushes him away so hard that I know she blames him for her wrecked life.
“You’ll scare Hansi!” he shouts at her. “Stop it!” He stands there with his hands on his hips like a Prussian general. All that’s missing is a chest full of medals. I had no idea he could reach the end of his patience so quickly. Do no men have stamina for suffering or is it just my father?
I wrap my arms around Mama from behind and shout at him,
“You’re the one who’s scaring people! Get out of the kitchen!”
I promise Mama I’ll find the recipe, which makes her stop fighting me. After she catches her breath, she says, “Don’t bother, Sophie, I must have burned it accidentally with your father’s things.” She speaks as though she’s inside a dream. She looks drugged. Could she have found my luminal?
Once I get her back to bed, she murmurs curses at my father. She calls him a son-of-a-bitch and a thief. Maybe the cancer has spread to her brain. Maybe that’s also what happened to her father.
She goes to sleep when I agree to caress her hair and not to leave her. “Thank God you’re with me, Sophie,” she says. She’s become a little girl who wants to sit at her mother’s kitchen table and scent the Knödel cooking on the stove.
That evening I write to Grandma and ask her to send the recipe as fast as she can.
The next day, Mama starts coughing as if barbed wire is stuck in her throat. The towel I hand her becomes flecked with blood, so she goes back to the hospital. A knot of tears forms in my throat whenever I see her there, and my legs grow tight with the need to flee. Hansi sits on Mama’s bed so she can hold him. Once, he tries to pull out her tubes while she’s sleeping. Maybe he wants to sneak her out. A nurse hollers at him, and from then on the hospital staff keep their distance from him as if he’s got leprosy.
The smell of her hospital room … I’ll remember that rank odor for years. I’ll dream of it. Black dreams that cleave to me, as though made of blood and urine.
I’m sitting in a chair in Mama’s room, reading the newspaper, half-sleeping, when she dies: the 6th of August, 1935, ten days short of Hansi’s twelfth birthday. She doesn’t call out or gasp. She simply stops breathing. Her mouth is open and her head is leaning back. I don’t know how long it takes for me to notice. Five minutes, ten … ?
The room grows dark and my legs lose all their strength when I stand, so that I have to kneel to keep from fainting. Then I rub her feet, which aren’t yet dead to me, because I can bring her to life in my head, and I sit beside her, closing her eyelids and neatening the hair falling over her brow, telling myself that now she’ll be able to walk over the rim of the Alps and go wherever she wants to, that she’ll even be able to go back in time to her golden age, when a Dutch schoolteacher believed she could become a nurse.
The things we tell ourselves when a loved one dies, all of them made from the fringes of hope still in our hands.
Papa comes to the hospital a bit later, sits alone with her, then takes me home, his arm over my shoulder. But before we go, I snip a lock of Mama’s hair—the hair I’ve cut—and put it in an envelope that a nurse finds for me. I want to have something from her that could only be hers.
The Knödel recipe arrives from Grandma a few days later. It includes nutmeg. Who would have guessed? I bury it with Mama; the last thing I want is another recipe for potatoes. And in any case it belongs to her.
Isaac is kind and patient with me during my mother’s illness, even when I’m yelling at him for no reason at all, and I bless him every day for not trying to cheer me up. Sometimes, we say little more than a How did your day go? before we make love. He moves slow and soft when he’s inside me, knowing I’m made of fragile hopes, and he stops if I ask him to, and he holds me in his warm arms, whispering in beautiful German that he will always help me. Afterward, he doesn’t rush off to his desk to read. A miracle.
The week Mama dies, my tangled, fraying mind comes completely undone and, sitting in the black puddle at the bottom of my grief, I decide, sobbing, to give myself bangs. I come out looking like a lampshade, so I run to Isaac’s flat and beg him to cut it short everywhere.
“Do it!” I shout when he hesitates.
As he snips, his face becomes so serious and determined that it makes me want to laugh, yet I can’t, and I keep telling him to cut it even shorter, as if I were a boy, and maybe that’s what I intended all along—a disguise, so I don’t have to be me. Or so I can fulfill my grandfather’s wish for no more girls.
“My Joan of Arc,” Isaac tells me after I’ve finally let him put down his scissors, and he rubs a delighted hand over the bristly top of my head.
I look like an imposter in the mirror. But I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel anything, in fact.
A few days later, I decide to tear up the drawing I did of my mother in the hospital, since her eyes and nose are all wrong, but Isaac pleads with me to give it to him for safekeeping. “I’ll keep it for you until you’ve come up again,” he says.
“Up from where?”
“From your mother’s grave.”
Isaac also reads poetry to me in bed, Rilke in particular, which would make Dr Fabig happy, wherever he is. Maybe we have to watch a loved one die before we can understand anything about Rilke’s work, about the sweet, subtle presence of sadness and joy between his words, as if those opposites are really just intertwined vines, and our little lives are the façades they must constantly climb. These are the verses I remember most clearly, and I always hear them in Isaac’s voice:
All things are the bodies of violins, full of murmuring darkness;
inside are dreams of the weeping of women, inside stirs in sleep
the resentment of whole generations …
I shall tremble silver: then everything under me shall come to life,
and that which errs in things shall strive towards the light …
I buy Isaac a black Basque beret to thank him for being so gentle with me. His eyes open wide with enchantment when I hand it to him. He wears it even in the house, and I
adore the way his silver hair ribbons out beneath the rim. Such a handsome man, and he doesn’t believe it, which is another reason I trust him.
Chapter Fifteen
Tonio comes to the funeral in uniform. We link hands with Hansi between us, and later he speaks to my father alone. I can guess what they talk about, because when my boyfriend catches up with me, he brings up marriage for the first time, but I do not want to be tied to him or Isaac or anyone else. Still, he obliges me to talk of our future, and as we do, I decide I want black borders to grow around my life, the ones Mama should have had. I want to be a girl in a Rouault painting.
“I can’t talk about anything right now and know what I’m saying,” I finally tell Tonio. “We’ll talk again in a couple of months.”
“Maybe your hair will have grown back by then,” he says, trying to cheer me up.
“I hope not,” I warn him.
While the minister’s sermon drags across our emotions, Hansi sits right on the lawn, his legs crossed. I can tell the boy fears rain. Papa looks at him as if he’s a lost cause, his face compressed by anger. I’d like to punch him for forgetting how to love my brother at the worst possible time.
After exchanging whispers with my father, Aunt Ilse marches over to Hansi and informs him that he’s a ridiculous sight. She grabs his wrists and tries to tug him to his feet, whispering that he’d better not fight her, which makes him shriek like a cornered animal, so I rush to her and say, “If you don’t leave my brother alone, I’ll break your neck!” Ich breche dir den Hals! I use those exact words, and even now I can feel the drum-tautness of righteousness in my heart. Aunt Ilse, ready to burst into tears, lets go of Hansi and orders me never to talk to her like that again, but I don’t apologize. I take Hansi’s hand and ask him to step back with me from the grave, which he does. Later, I overhear Ilse informing Grandma that I may already be suffering from the family madness.
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