by Marge Piercy
Abra thought it a pity her written notes would never reflect Marlitt’s voice, rich, resonant, mocking, spicy. Ginger ice cream, she thought, at once sweet and hot. Yet Marlitt was dry at the core, a strange detached quality to her, as if she were really much older, a nun looking back with cool disinterest on her life in the wicked world.
“No, my father and my uncle were the political ones. I was young and consumed by fashion and parties and dances and art shows. Berlin is like New York, it sucks all the arts into itself. In Berlin, the Nazis were just a handful of nuts. Nobody paid them any mind. There weren’t but two or three hundred of them until that vile little weasel Goebbels arrived. He sent them around beating up the leftists. They would march into meetings in working-class areas and break them up and start riots. That got them in the newspapers, and all the thugs in town were soon queuing up to get in on the fun. Nonetheless if the rich had not gone sniffing after them, like that bitch Magda Quandt, who married him finally, they’d never have had the resources. To think I designed for her once. Oh, she didn’t have two political thoughts to rub together, and I doubt she was even anti-Semitic in those days.
“My husband?” She paused a long time. Her face seemed to flatten. “No, Speyer is not really my husband, I will explain. My husband was Martin Becker. He was a handsome man, big built, over six feet tall. He had played soccer in school. He died in the camp at Buchenwald. They said of a disease. They usually said things like that. Someday I suppose we’ll know. I heard typhus was endemic.…”
Abra recognized that a gate had closed in her informant. About her husband Marlitt did not want to speak further. Abra changed her line of questioning, intending to circle back later. “We left through France. I didn’t feel comfortable in France, too many restrictions against Jewish immigrants, what you could do, what you couldn’t. They resented you. We went on to Portugal. I had to work there as a dressmaker, almost a seamstress. Down in the world, no? I made fancy dresses for the ladies.
“Ah, Mr. Speyer. I met him in Portugal. Speyer is an American Jew, a widower. He married me to bring me in and we brought my father and mother also afterward. No, it was kindness. He lives with his mistress, but he can’t marry her—the children of his first wife won’t allow it—and I signed a paper renouncing all his property. No, my dear, not exactly a marriage blanc, let’s not put that down. After all, we traveled together and I did live in his apartment when I arrived, which his friend did not care for at all. Now that my citizenship is all secure, we’re having a quiet little divorce. And maybe Alfred will do it again. He’s a good man, I eat with them every Sunday—Friday with my own parents. I love to think of Alfred going back and forth and marrying all these women and in truth enjoying it all and then settling us safely here. He’s a very good man. You ought to interview him.…”
While Marlitt in that dry detached way refused to lie for the record and claim her relationship with Speyer was platonic, nonetheless she sounded as distanced about him as about anyone else. Abra asked, “But isn’t it awkward, people thinking that you’re married when you aren’t? You’re an attractive woman. You must meet men.”
“It’s convenient,” Marlitt said briskly. “It gives no false impressions, because I was married and have no interest in being so again.… What? My real husband? He was a journalist, but after they fired Jews from the newspapers he became active in the Kulturbund. You see, we had these actors and musicians and singers thrown out of work and all of us who were gradually shut out of public places. He began writing little plays for the Kulturbund. That was why the Nazis went after him so early. The plays, they were very funny. Everything, you understand, was oblique. If you said anything direct, they would come right in and arrest you. You could use what we called the New Midrash, everything was in terms of stories we knew. He wrote and staged a Purim play, and we all knew who Haman was. But I think the Nazis figured that one out too.”
Marlitt was easy to interview. Her English was excellent and she had insisted on speaking it. “It’s harder to speak of these things in German,” she said firmly. She spoke dryly, without tears. Abra began to see in her someone whose tears had been drained. “Yes, I had a son. That is no one’s business who has not seen such a death. I will not speak of it.
“My father, my uncle, were both involved in the Reichsvertretung. That was the instrument through which we tried to present a unified front to the Nazis. We kept hoping this insanity could not continue. A government that was mad? Who could believe it. Business as usual, propaganda, some violence, but surely it would stop there. Surely the other powers would not permit what the Nazis said they were going to do to us. We kept expecting Hitler to begin to act like a sane government. He has the big industrial barons behind him now, we told each other, they will make him relent. The Krupps, the Farbens, they don’t want to tear the country apart. If they insist, he will leave us in peace. During the Olympic Games, things seemed to be mellowing. We kept hoping. Every so often we or our friends would go and investigate emigration, but nobody would give us visas. The British wouldn’t let us in Palestine and didn’t want us in England and the United States didn’t want Jews. But after Kristallnacht, we had no hope, no illusion. We ran. We left our dead in the earth we had lived on for centuries, and we ran.”
Marlitt was suddenly and obviously exhausted. She touched her high forehead with a pale hand and stirred once in her chair. Abra took her leave, hoping that Professor Kahan would find the interview probing enough. Often as he went over her typescript he would point out areas where she should have persisted. She was learning the ground. Oftentimes even as she learned the names of the organizations these people had been involved with in Germany, she nonetheless asked each informant to explain that organization to her. Professor Kahan said there was always more to learn about an organization in another country, and that what people thought they were involved in when they joined something and what they thought the group was doing were as important as what it actually accomplished.
He would sometimes play interviewer or informant with her and show her ways of asking the same question that sounded different, or pursuing a point in the face of reticence without sounding nosy or coming across as dangerous. The most important aspect of Abra’s performance—that was what he called it—was seeming naive and goodwilled and interested, but never with any deeper purpose. “A student, a good-hearted well-meaning American student, that is who you are and that is who you will show them.”
“That’s the sum of who I am?” she asked with some pique.
“That’s not such a bad person to be, is it?” Oscar Kahan had the habit of returning a question with a question.
She was glad she didn’t have to interview him, because she could imagine how he would defeat questioning. Her curiosity had been much whetted in the past months. “I’m not as politically naive as you assume—”
“Argue that with me, but don’t prove it to the subjects. They need to feel a little superior in knowledge. They are refugees, remember, lost in a strange country and torn from a social web that they understood or thought they did. Nothing means the same here. Nothing is done the same way. They are children again. Allow them to make you a little the child as you conduct your interviews—not a stupid child but a willing, bright but naive child who wants to understand.”
That’s how he himself sees me, she thought, and was suddenly, coolly infuriated. “Professor Kahan, why do you have me ask so many questions about the street they lived on, the school they went to, the exact addresses, the names of cemeteries where their parents are buried, all that?”
He leaned across the desk toward her with a warm conspiratorial smile. “And why do you think we ask those questions, Miss Scott?”
“One possibility is that you think that when people recall specific physical details of their past life, that the other details will be more precise?”
“There. You see you have your own answer.”
“If I think two and two are five, I have my own answer too.”
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“But we’re dealing with the subjective, putting an informant and a questioner both at ease, aren’t we?”
She assumed an imitation of his furrowed brow and quizzical smile. “Are we?” She waited but he simply waited also, as if for clarification. He was a subtle one, her professor, and that surprised her, for his first appearance was that of an open, curious, warm and quite unselfconscious man. All of those things he might be, but he was also singularly close. She wondered if he were more open with the women he was involved with—whoever she or they might be. “I have one more question. I notice we ask our German political refugees a set of questions about economic conditions inside Germany that we don’t ask our Jewish refugees. Why?”
“We are assuming that conditions for the Jews are markedly different than for the rest of the German population, and that we can learn little about the German economy from questioning the Jews, since they’re being forced out of it. We can’t find out whether butter is scarce by asking a Jew.”
“Professor Kahan, if we’re doing a political science research project on the relationships and internal structure of German political organizations in the thirties, why do we care if butter is scarce in Germany now? And please don’t ask me what I think this time.”
“Do you enjoy the work?”
“Does that mean, if I like doing the work, I shouldn’t ask so many questions?”
“It means, do you enjoy the work?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He beamed at her. “Have you discussed this question of the scarcity of butter with your friends?”
“No.”
“Why not, if it puzzles you?”
“It’s nobody else’s business. It’s simply one of those questions that arises and then I put it aside to ask you.”
“Because you have some idea of the answer?”
“Too vague to be useful.”
“Let it remain that way for a while.”
“For a while?”
He rose, to signal their interview was over. “One point you have made today is that you are not unobservant and will make me eat my words about your being naive. About the matter of drawing your thesis from the interviews, go see Blumenthal this week. Maybe you’d like to speed up that process a bit. We’d have to edit the interviews heavily before you take versions you can write your thesis on, but that would present no problem. Still, get on with it. Finish your thesis up as quickly as you can is my final advice of the day.”
Dumped from his office with twenty more questions to ask, Abra walked home through the April rain wondering what that advice meant. He was telling her to hurry her thesis, but why? Would the project end soon? But she would still have the interviews. Was he leaving? He had an associate professorship at Columbia. Was he enlisting? He was overage, assuredly. Yet she sensed she should take his advice and curtail her social life sharply. She sighed. If he understood how little a doctorate really meant to her, he would probably lose respect and replace her as an assistant, but a doctorate remained more the excuse for her interesting life than the necessary product of it. She had intended to drag out her thesis project for years.
Normally Abra walked through the streets of New York gazing around her at the passing show, afraid to miss an event or a nuance. Today she plodded through the puddles chin tucked into her trench coat. She would follow her instinct that she should make every move he recommended and go hell-bent for her degree, if for no better reason than that Kahan had told her to, and she was convinced that he was going to be her real mentor.
Oh well, half the men she knew were going into the services, anyhow. She might as well get the damned degree. At least the interviews were interesting.
Eight days later it happened that the woman she was interviewing knew Marlitt Becker Speyer. Mrs. Hirsch had few organizational ties and little interest in politics. The only interesting part of the interview came toward the end, when she talked about Marlitt. She had known Marlitt as a little girl when she had worked for Marlitt’s mother; years later Marlitt had taken her on as a seamstress in her couturier establishment. Toward the end, she said, the class lines had faded as the Jews were pushed into ghettoes and forced to live ten or twelve to a small apartment and systematically impoverished. Marlitt went on working almost to the end, because the Nazis wanted her designs even though they put a different label on them to conceal their origin, and Marlitt had kept on her own staff.
Mrs. Hirsch was fifty, a gaunt woman with white hair braided around her head and nearsighted eyes the color of weak tea behind thick glasses, a habit of bending forward as if to hear, although her hearing seemed fine. They conducted the interview in German. Abra took notes in her usual mix of German and English. Mrs. Hirsch said that shortly after Marlitt had heard of the death of her husband, whose body she was not allowed to reclaim for proper burial, her only child, a boy of four, had taken sick.
It was one of those sudden childhood fevers that shoot up and up. He grew more feverish until he was having diarrhea every fifteen minutes. Then he began to vomit blood. He was pitiful. Jews were no longer allowed in regular hospitals, and the only Jewish hospital was full beyond stretching. A doctor who could no longer prescribe medicines came, but he could not bring down the fever, and while the family hovered over him, Marlitt held her son in his suffering and his convulsions. It took the boy two days to die, Mrs. Hirsch said. Marlitt went out of the room every few minutes to weep in the hall, for fear of frightening the child when he was conscious. When her son died, she said she would pay no more tears, ever. She would get them all out of Germany, she would tear up her roots that ran to the center of this familiar earth, and she would never return, not if she lived to be two hundred. Oh yes, Mrs. Hirsch said, she brought me here. She could not save my husband, her own husband or her child, but she saved her parents and she saved me.
BERNICE 2
Bernice on Patrol
Every Monday, every Wednesday and every Friday, Bernice hopped on her Schwinn bicycle at seven-thirty A.M. and set off in rain or sun or unseasonable flurries of late snow For the local airport, hoping that the weather would permit her to take off on time. She carried with her an old leather jacket of Jeff’s—the plane of course was not heated—her lunch and a small plastic bottle with a funnel, into which she urinated and which she hid in her empty lunch bucket when she landed. She had no idea how other pilots managed, for she had worked out that method herself.
Bernice had never before considered herself especially fortunate to live in central Massachusetts rather than on the coast, but now she did. Women were not allowed to fly for the Civil Air Patrol over the coastal zone, as that was considered dangerous because of U-boats. The Civil Air Patrol officially looked askance at women flying for it at all. When Bernice had joined she had been sternly informed that only auxiliary functions were open to women, running the offices. She had almost given up, during weeks of typing and filing, but the need for pilots was great and Bernice had at least as much experience as most of the pilots flying for the Civil Air Patrol. She had persisted till now she flew regularly for them.
Sometime around the end of April or the middle of May she would finally log in two hundred hours flying time. She wanted that commercial license more than ever, but she did not have the money. The Civil Air Patrol volunteers were unpaid, and now she had much less time to type faculty papers. If she could finally earn her instructor’s license, she might be hired by the War Service Training Program, which taught flying to students. They had kicked women students out of the program, but they still used women instructors.
Even if flying for the Civil Air Patrol was keeping her penniless, she had three days a week of bliss, and if The Professor was cranky about his supper on those nights, she had the excuse of rationing. Moreover, he could not fault her volunteering for the war effort.
What was hard was to return when she was supposed to, after flying her route inspecting power lines against sabotage and forested areas for fires. She felt an urge strong as she suppos
ed the mating instinct was in deer or dogs, to continue, to fly on until she reached the far unknown ocean. She had an intimate view of the little wrinkled hills of her home, of the broad Connecticut, of the hawks migrating north and the flights of small birds, of the farmlands standing under their puddles, of the rain clouds massing over the Berkshires, of the updrafts around Mount Tom. For three days every week she was ecstatic and useful, at one with the fabric body that extended her own. She did not think there had been a time since the death of her mother, when she had been happy for three days of every week.
Sometimes she was called on other days to act as a courier for documents or chemicals or plasma, to impersonate an enemy bomber in an air raid, twice to search for a downed military plane. Her life had a purpose. She begged off the Sunday movies with Mrs. Augustine, for she needed to catch up with housework and the typing that could pay for her commercial license eventually, but not at all any longer impossibly. She had the same schedule that had used to pad out seven days now crammed into the remaining four. Above all she had three days of doing what she was born to do, three days when she put on the little plane like a flimsy extended body, insectlike around her, beautiful as a dragonfly although jeweled only to her, and burst into flight.
That evening when she bicycled home from the airport, stopping to buy flounder and place the white parcel neatly in her handlebar basket, a letter from Jeff was waiting on the table in the hall. He was still stuck down in Alabama hating every moment of his life vegetating there. Bernice had expected Jeff to be placed in the Army Air Corps, as the Army was supposed to be seeking pilots desperately, for even though Jeff had not flown in years, he had his license, but instead they had focused on his unsuspected talents as an instructor of rifle practice. He had been sent for officer training and was a second lieutenant apparently stuck on the range. He claimed to be entirely covered with Spanish moss. She had felt a mixture of envy and foreboding when they packed Jeff off on the train, but he was safe unless one of his students shot wildly, and far more bored than she was.
