A Feather on the Breath of God

by Sigrid Nunez

  The year I was born my grandfather opened an autorepair shop in the Swabian town where he had lived all his life, a business later passed on to the elder of his two sons. I do not remember him from the one time I met him, when I was taken as a child to Germany. The memory of my grandmother, on the other hand, is among the most vivid I possess. “You took one look at her and called her a witch.” So I already knew about witches, at two. Pictures show that she really did have the sickle profile of a witch. And I was right to fear her. She locked me in a dark closet, where I screamed so loud the neighbors came.

  My grandparents had grown up together. An illegitimate child, my grandmother was adopted by the childless couple who lived next door to my grandfather’s family. In summer, the narrow yard between the two houses was filled with butterflies. My grandparents were said never to have had any interest in anyone but each other, and to have shared a strong physical resemblance all their lives. My grandmother was known for her temper. During the war, when shoes were all but impossible to get and her son Karl lost one shoe of his only pair, she pummeled his head with the other; he still has the scar. Whenever my mother, the eldest child and only daughter, spoke of her mother, she tended to purse her lips. (“We were always at odds.” “She didn’t like girls.”) When I met her for the second and last time, I was in my twenties and she had not long to live. Dying, she was still mean. A habit of reaching out and pinching you as you passed: teasing, hurtful. The pinching malice peculiar to some little old ladies. Revealing things my mother had kept from us: for example, that both of my sisters were illegitimate, and that my mother was too. (“You didn’t know?”) She suffered all her life from bad circulation and died of a stroke.

  My grandparents were Catholics, and at that time in that town, most of the power was in the hands of the Catholic Church. Like other Catholic towns, somewhat slower to embrace National Socialism. I am not sure how much danger my grandfather thought he was courting when, just before the national election in November 1933, he stood outside the town hall distributing anti-Hitler leaflets. Before this, he had shown little interest in politics. His opposition to the Nazis grew largely under the influence of a friend named Ulli, who planned to leave for America if Hitler got more than seventy-five percent of the vote. My grandfather’s two siblings were already in America, having emigrated in the twenties, but neither of my grandparents wished to leave Germany. My grandmother also may have influenced her husband against the Nazis. Her father had been an official of the Social Democratic party. She had had many leftists among the friends of her youth and had been an admirer of Rosa Luxemburg. She was arrested with her husband immediately after Hitler’s victory.

  “They woke us up in the middle of the night.” “The Gestapo?” “No, no, just the regular town police.” My mother was six. “One of the policemen was someone I knew, an old man. I used to see him in the street all the time, he was very nice. But after that night I was so scared of him. Any time I saw him after that I ran the other way.”

  They searched the house. Earlier that night, while my mother slept, Ulli had come to the door. “Hide these for me.” A gun, a typewriter.

  A policeman—“not the old one”—opened the hall closet, and the typewriter slid off the top shelf. He covered his head just in time. “I remember, his face turned bright red.”

  “Gerhard and I stood together on the stairs, crying. Karl slept through it all—he was just a baby.”

  My grandparents were led out to the waiting police van. “It was already filled with people.”

  “Out of nowhere” a woman appeared. “A complete stranger. She was very stern. She told us to go back to our room and not dare to come out.”

  The next morning my grandmother returned, alone. Later, after dark, she took the gun hidden in the wall behind the toilet and buried it in the backyard.

  Eight months before, Heinrich Himmler had set up the concentration camp at Dachau. It now held about two thousand inmates. My mother said my grandfather never talked much about his time there. “He was ashamed of having done something so stupid.” In one beating he suffered a broken rib that healed grotesquely—“like a doorknob on his chest.” “You are going home,” he was told, and put on a truck with a group of fellow prisoners who were driven to the train station. The train came and went. The prisoners watched it come and go. Then they were driven back to the camp. This happened many times. Meanwhile, there was work to be done. The camp was expanding. My grandfather was put to work installing electrical wiring. And one day, thirteen months after his arrest, he really was let go. He was sent home in his prison uniform. My mother was playing in the street when another little girl ran up, scandalized. “Christa! Your papa is coming across the field—and he’s in his pajamas!”

  “He was lucky.” Ulli did not get out of Dachau until ’45. (And then he left for America.)

  My grandparents’ house had been confiscated, their bank accounts closed. My grandmother had moved with the children into the house of her in-laws. She had taken a job in a drapery shop.

  My grandfather was afraid that no one would hire him. He appealed to an old friend from polytechnic days, now at Daimler-Benz. A relatively quiet time began. Every day my grandfather took the half-hour train ride into Stuttgart. He was not troubled again by the Nazis. And when, after Hitler’s speeches on the radio, my grandmother carried on—Hitler-like herself, according to my mother—my grandfather said, “Let Germany follow her own course.

  Time passed. The town synagogue was closed. The town idiot, a homeless man who begged on the church steps, disappeared. The main department store went out of business. The gardens of the houses where the Jews lived became overgrown. Consternation among the Mendels. They want to go to America, but Oma is stubborn. The very mention of crossing the ocean makes her weep. Finally, a compromise is reached: The Mendels will go with their little boy to America, Oma will go to Switzerland. Before leaving she entrusts two trunks to my grandparents’ care. “I’ll want them back someday.”

  Nineteen thirty-nine. My grandfather was called on a blue and sunny midsummer’s day. He was with the troops that invaded Poland, and would remain in the army until Germany’s defeat.

  Meanwhile, my mother was growing up. Away, mostly, at a Catholic boarding school in the Bavarian Alps.

  The nuns are hard. My mother comes home with a horror tale: a cat smuggled into the dorm, discovered by Sister and thrown into the furnace! Still, her parents send her back.

  For many of the girls, returning year after year, from age six to eighteen, the school is home. Away, my mother is homesick all the time; but at home, especially over the long summer, she pines for school.

  At the end of one summer, the girls arrive to find the nuns replaced by men and women in uniform. The nuns, they are told, have returned to their convent, where they belong. From now on, my mother’s education is in the hands of the Nazis.

  Over the next few years, many of the new teachers will be soldiers wounded in the war: amputees; a math professor whose face was so scarred, “we thought at first he was wearing a mask.”

  As she recalls, no one ever made any reference to her father’s disgrace; she was not treated any differently from the other girls.

  She keeps up her grades but she does not excel. Unlike her brothers, she is not superior in math. She does not seem to have been ambitious, to have dreamed of becoming something.

  (Up to this point, I have had some trouble seeing my mother. Even with the help of photographs, it is hard for me to imagine her as a little girl. Unlike a lot of people, she did not much resemble her adult self The child of six crying with her brother on the stairs, running away from the old policeman—I see that girl, but she could be anyone. But now, she is beginning to be familiar. I can imagine her, her feelings and her moods. I can see her more and more clearly: Christa.)

  School trips to the opera. (“He who would understand National Socialism must understand Wagner”—Hitler.) Hot and stuffy in the balcony. The agony of itching woolen stockin
gs. She would always hate opera. Today: “All I have to do is hear a bit of it and my feet start to itch like I haven’t washed them for weeks!”

  Another thing she hated: her turn to tend the rabbits, raised by the school for food. The filth of the cages. The fierceness of one particular buck, known to the girls as Ivan the Terrible.

  The Hitler Youth. Uniforms, camping, sports. “Just like your Girl Scouts.”

  The rallies and the victory parades. “Tell me what kid doesn’t love a parade.” A little flag on a stick. Flowers for the soldiers. Always something to celebrate. April 20th: the Führer’s birthday. My mother has just celebrated her tenth. He marches through the Munich streets, veering right and left with outstretched hand. His palm is warm. Photo opportunity. Later, back at school, a copy of the photo is presented to her. She bears it home, proud, somebody. Her mother tears it up. My mother threatens to tell.

  School pictures. My mother in her winter uniform, looking, like most of the other girls, comically stout. (“We probably had three sweaters on underneath.”)

  Trude, Edda, Johanna, Klara—my mother’s little band.

  Girls becoming women. One’s own tiny destiny absorbed into that of the Volk. To be a Frau und Mutter in the heroic mold, champions of the ordered cupboard and snowy diaper. The body: nothing to blush about but always to be treated with respect. My mother earns high marks in gymnastics. She is good at embroidery and crocheting.

  Dance lessons. Ballroom steps, the taller girls leading.

  The heart-swelling beauty of the landscape, especially at sundown. Alpenglow. Someone called it: Beethoven for the eyes.

  Lights out at nine. Talking verboten. Whispers in the dark. Confessions, yearnings. Boys back home. Teachers: “I don’t care that he has only one arm.” Gary Cooper. The Luftwaffe aces. And:”Leni Riefenstahl was so beautiful.”

  In the summers, you had to work, at least part-time. You might be a mother’s helper, or work on a farm. You had to bring written proof that you had not idled your whole vacation away. As the war deepened and you got older, you were assigned labor service: delivering mail, collecting tickets on the streetcars, working in factories or offices.

  The last year of the war, eight girls assigned to track enemy planes in the same operations room in Stuttgart are killed by a bomb. Among them my mother’s best friend, Klara.

  The last battles. Only the German victories are announced. But who cannot read the increasingly somber miens of the teachers. Letters from home tell of brothers, still in school themselves, called to fight. “Erich sends his love and asks you to pray for him.”

  Still, when it comes, the announcement is shocking. “You must make your way home as best you can. Don’t try to carry too much with you. And be careful. There are enemy soldiers everywhere—and some of them are black.”

  My mother had already had a letter from her father at the front. “When the war ends, don’t be foolish and try to outrun the enemy. Try if you can to hide until they have passed. Do not let them keep driving you ahead of them. It won’t do you any good, they’ll just catch up with you anyway. And whatever you do, do not go east.”

  My mother boarded a train, but long before her hometown station a roadblock appeared and the passengers were put off Against advice she had packed all her belongings. Now she left two suitcases on the train, keeping only her knapsack; she would soon abandon that too.

  (It is at this point that my mother finally comes in clearly, on this four-day walk home.)

  For the first stretch she has company—other people from the train headed in the same direction. But for most of the journey she is alone. She is not afraid. Just days ago she turned eighteen. The sense of having an adventure buoys her up, at least for a time. Also, in the very extremity of the situation, a certain protection: “This can’t be happening.” Blessings: weather (“That was a beautiful April”), and she is in good shape from Alpine hiking.

  Dashing for cover at the sound of a motor. The enemy is everywhere.

  Hunger. She cannot remember her last good meal. At school, day after day, cabbage and potatoes. The tender early spring shoots begin to resemble succulent morsels. At dusk she knocks at a farmhouse and is given an eggnog and a place to sleep in the barn. The steamy flanks of the cows. Infinity of peace in that pungent smell, in the scrape of hoof against board. Morning. Rain. “Dear God, just let me lie here a little bit longer.”

  Sometimes she sings out, as people do, from loneliness, and for courage. “Don’t ask me, for I’ll never tell, the man I’m going to marry.”

  What passes through her mind cannot properly be called thought, though her mind is constantly busy, and she loses herself in herself for hours at a time. Daydreams bring amusement and solace. Her senses are lulled and she is carefree. Funny thoughts do occur to her now and then, and she laughs out loud. Sometimes she watches her feet, and the fact that they can move like that, right, left, right, covering the ground and bearing her along, strikes her as nothing less than miraculous.

  Often she is light-headed. She imagines her head floating like a balloon above her. Attached by a string to her finger. She jerks the string, and her head tilts this way and that, like the head of an Indian dancer.

  People met along the way move furtively, every one in a hurry. “No one would look you in the eye.”

  Straw in her hair, itching between collar and neck. Seams loosening with wear. The smell of the cows mingled with her own. A burning sensation in the folds of her flesh. Will she ever get to change her underwear?

  She mistakes a turn, walks for miles down the wrong road before turning back. In the fields, the first wildflowers. A tumult of sparrows. She is seized by the unbearably poignant sensation of déjà vu.

  A plane. Nowhere to hide. She squats where she is, arms over her head. The plane swoops down, low, so low she can make out the grinning face of the (British) pilot, who salutes before taking to the sky again. Laughing, she embraces her knees and bursts into tears. In that moment of terror her heart had flown straight to her mother. From now on she will often be struck by fear, foreseeing her house in ruins, and her mother dead.

  (A young woman fixed upon reaching home and Mother, making her way through a conquered land overrun with enemy soldiers: I read that part of Gone With the Wind with a swell of recognition.)

  At last: the church tower, the wooden bridge. A woman in the Marktplatz, weeping, weeping.

  My mother beat the Americans by one day.

  The Occupation. A time to count your blessings—“at least for us it really was over”—as the refugees streamed in from East Prussia. The Americans: “You know, typical American boys—loud, friendly, vulgar. Every other word was f-u-c-k.”

  One day an American lieutenant came to the door. “Jewish boy, grinning from ear to ear. ‘You don’t remember me? I’ve come for the trunks my grandmother left.’ We couldn’t believe it. Walter Mendel, all grown up. He brought us our first Hershey bars.”

  Incredulity, the sense of this-isn’t-really-happening, endures. A topsy-turvy time. Dating the enemy. Fräuleins in the arms of American soldiers. Eating themselves sick in the mess hall hung with Stop-VD posters: Don’t Take a Chance, Keep It In Your Pants.

  For my mother, the start of a new life.

  (And here I begin to lose her again; I mean, I no longer see her clearly. About this period—so important to me because directly connected to my own coming into being—about this period she hardly spoke at all.)

  She has a job, teaching kindergarten, which does not suit her. She doesn’t particularly like children, and since these are the children of farmers, she has to keep farmers’ hours, going to and coming back from work in the dark.

  Whatever energy is left over goes into dating. First in her heart is Rudolf. He is her own age, a boy from the neighborhood, grown in the years she was away into stripling-handsomeness. Had her life been happy she probably would have remembered her experience of him as a lark; instead he became the love of her life, her one and only.

&nb
sp; She said often, “I should have married him”; but just as often, “I couldn’t have married him, we would never have gotten along, we were too much alike.” In other ways too, she hinted at an intense and dramatic entanglement. But I don’t think it really was like that. I think she convinced herself that it was, because this helped her. There is consolation in seeing oneself as a victim of love. (Ideally, of course, Rudolf should have died—killed, say, as so many other German boys his age were killed, in the last months of the war.)

  “After him, I really didn’t care what happened to me.”

  Rudolf. One precious photograph included in the family album. Curly hair and a curl to his upper lip, from a scar, giving him a somewhat cruel expression; and indeed it was by cruelty that he got that scar: He taunted a rooster, who flew in his face. He was fickle, he liked to make my mother jealous. Well, two could play at that game. From among the throng of GIs my mother picks the least likely: half-Chinese, half-Spanish, and almost as old as her parents.

  Two can play the game, but for men and women the stakes are not equal.

  My mother becomes pregnant.

  Lacan says: Only women’s lives can be tragic; about men there is always something comic.

  Newsreels from this era show that the attempt to turn women who had consorted with Nazis into laughingstocks, by shaving their heads, failed.

  The next period of her life is the one I have most trouble imagining. I think it also must have been the hardest. “I thought I had died and gone to hell.” But it was only Brooklyn.

  The housing project looked like a prison. “Your father had said something about a house with a little garden. What a fool I was.” (She often called herself a fool. Another thing she said a lot: “You made your own bed, now you have to lie in it.” She had little sympathy for people who’d botched their lives, and toward real sinners she was unforgiving. She often complained that criminals in this country got off scot-free. And she was suspicious of repentance. You could not escape punishment by confession or apology. She herself rarely apologized. I’m not sure to what degree she applied her own harsh rules to herself. I know only that she suffered a lot.)