The evening of the dinner, our guest was late. The soup, turtle with pearl onions, grew a skin. It was raining outside, a very businesslike German sort of rain that desired only to fall, not detain. But the patients, dressed in the clean starch of their borrowed linen, were trembling. It began with Gertzi, a low sort of keening from a distant point in his throat, lulled louder by an involuntary rocking, a swaying, as certain piers are swayed by the gathered force of passing waves. Soon a shout broke from him, a spray of panic over the sour gunwale of his lips that drenched the others. And the voices spiraled upward, shot from the cannons of their poor throats, foghorns of the lost. I could have quelled their nerves with a little frosting in my face, a few slip-falls to the flat of my back, but the doctor had confiscated my cork and banned me from the soiree under the pretext of punishing me for defaming the Reich. But I had made a science of stealth. I had sneaked out from my room and could see them through the porthole of the kitchen door.
“Stop this at once!” the doctor shouted. Threats worked as well as compassion. The doctor smoothed the apron front of her dress, a cruel-looking thing of black muslin that clapped like stage thunder when she walked. Her face was still flushed with her instructive anger when the officer entered, unannounced. The doctor snapped her fingers once and the patients fell to muster.
“Rain,” he offered with a formal bow of his head, taking off his leather greatcoat and shaking it with a graceful veer of his torso. The raindrops crackled to the floor, not daring to moisten him. He was the most staggeringly beautiful man I had ever seen. High cheekbones. Full lips. Impossible eyes. We all seemed struck by him, and it was the doctor herself who finally broke his charismatic spell and took his coat and led him to the dining room.
“You will please forgive us if we go directly into dinner,” she said.
“Of course,” he said, removing his peaked cap. He wore the uniform of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, as velvety and black as deep space. But where most members of his unit were still sporting brown shirts in deference to their roots in the SA, his collar was white. This was a look that would not meet with sartorial favor until after the invasion of Poland. He was a trendsetter, this one.
I could see them as they entered the dining room. The officer sat with his back to me. “I will have wine, please,” he said. “Something cold and yellow and not too sweet. We will dismiss the soup. What is the main course?”
“D-duck,” the doctor stuttered, still standing.
Gertzi poured beautifully, poured with the silence and grace of a spring brook, and stopped when the officer raised two fingers to his glass.
“A half portion of the duck, I think,” he said. He had a beautiful voice, deep with a slight stickiness of laryngic bass (American cigarettes?). What Lubitsch would call “conversational charming.”
The dinner proceeded. The patients acquitted themselves reasonably well. Nothing spilled, sloshed, or dropped. But, apart from Gertzi, they were not graceful. In effect, they were like hand-carved versions of devices better suited to fabrication in metal. But the officer, who never gave his name, was politely indulgent and even whispered “Thank you” when his plate of neatly piled bird bones was shakily lifted from its place.
“You seem a remarkably resourceful woman,” he said, addressing the doctor, the only other diner at his table. “A realist, Frau . . . ?”
“Fräulein . . . Flosse,” she corrected.
“Fräulein—pardon the assumption—Flosse. That is why it seems remarkable to me that you would assume the veil of your silence enough to hide something of this magnitude from the Reich.”
The doctor drained of color. Wasn’t he going to compliment the meal? The rustic yet passable service?
He went straight to business. The Party had this effect on men, even sons who had been raised with the manner of small talk. Though confused, the doctor knew she had transgressed and was nervous now to appear more ignorant than guilty.
“Sorry?” she said, waving her cup away when Gertzi took a chance on refilling it.
“We know of the female child,” the officer said, lighting a cigarette.
The doctor opened her mouth, but the officer, seated rather near her, used the pad of his upturned index finger to close her flummoxed jaw.
“Please,” he said, smiling. “I have not come here as the agent of any personal retaliation. Your motives, though your own, I’m sure were in keeping with Party precepts. We simply want the child.”
How I longed to embarrass the bejesus out of the doctor, to burst through the kitchen door and fall on my knees, hands held out for the cuffs, saying, “You got me, bruddah! Take me to the chief,” doing my best Chico Marx. But I was quiet. It seemed the officer was doing a remarkable job himself.
“I’m not finished with her, sir,” the doctor managed to say.
“I see,” he said, leaning back, exhaling Ronald Colman–like. “Then perhaps you would be willing to draft the communication denying the führer his personal request?” He waited for his sentence to have its effect. Then, “Oh yes, my orders are to take the child back to Berlin. I assure you, Fräulein Flosse, there is no regret in failure. Only in refusing to comply.”
“When were you thinking of taking her?”
There was genuine sadness in the doctor’s voice.
The officer was unmoved.
“Immediately. Tonight.”
“But that is quite impossible! She’s not packed! She’s not prepared!”
“Be sure to make that your main justification when you draft that letter to the führer.”
“Might I request some time alone with her? To say good-bye?”
The doctor’s eyes were wet now. She lifted the metal-like fabric of her apron to her eye, folding it somehow into a cone with which she daubed her tears. I was amazed she did not blind herself.
“Of course,” the officer said breezily. “I am just curious, however. How much time does an officer of the Thousand-Year Reich need to say good-bye to a degenerative medical anomaly remanded from her fruitless analysis?”
Shame vied with contempt in the doctor’s eyes.
“I shall have her ready at once,” she said.
I raced through the kitchen and up the back stairs and deposited myself under my satin sheets. I was grateful I had no beating heart to give away my exertions. As I lay in my consort’s bed, looking up to the silken vortex of the canopy above me, I thought of the patients, of Gertzi, all stunned into silence by the conversation they’d only partially understood. That evening their coats would be collected and exposed, in a special airtight closet, to an open box of Zyklon B. The gas would perform the task for which it was invented: to rid clothing of lice and more tenacious vermin. In the morning, the patients would recount their triumphant exploits of the previous evening as they filed out of their cells. They would pantomime plates landed and lifted softly as songbirds. Gertzi would pour and pour again from empty hands his ineffable bottle of cold yellow wine and they would follow one another, smiling sheep, into showers where they would never be tutored in the correct use of soap.
Dr. Flosse finally made it to my room. She had changed her dress, which was a relief to me, as I was free from having to compliment it. Her face was fresh from a few handfuls of cold water. She wore her officious skirt, her white lab coat, a touch of perfume. It was the impression she wanted to make, the way she wanted me to remember her. The doctor had difficult news and I listened, quietly, curious how she would deliver her lines.
“Berlin has sent for you. The officer is waiting downstairs.”
She had grown fascinated with a loose flesh-colored thread from my comforter. I tried not to disturb this fascination as I uncurled from my sheets and removed my nightgown.
“You’ll like Berlin,” she said briskly. “Lovely city. Sidewalks and trees and little schnitzel vendors.”
She removed an ironed handkerchief from the pocket of her coat and blew.
“I know Berlin,” I said, pulling my blouse over my head. I gave
her no indication that I was fully prepared to go.
“Of course. You’re to meet the führer, a rare honor. He has a delightful dog that he has taught to be a vegetarian. Perhaps he’ll let you feed it some raw carrots or something.”
I had never mentioned an affinity for animals, but it was not me of whom she was speaking. It was her construct, her charming little unbreakable doll that was now being forced from her grasp, leaving her alone in her play pit of ash.
“He has a charming car, the young officer who is to drive you. Perhaps he’ll let you sit in the front seat.” And her tears came like some grotesque eruption, brimming past the ability of her hanky. The bed quaked with each explosive sob.
“Ach, you must forgive me,” she said with one furious mop of her face, but I was not even listening as I worried the buckle on my left shoe.
“You say he’s downstairs?” I asked, fully dressed from the doorway.
“Who?”
“This officer. With the car.”
“Maddy . . .”
“Yes?”
“Now that you’re leaving, won’t you please . . . could you just tell me the significance of those three little words? The ones you shouted that day in the shower?” I had denied the knowledge to Chaney. Had grasped at it only in the frenzied terror of losing Mutter. Under sober reflection, my condition was something I would not thrust upon my worst enemy. So it was with complete candor that I looked into the doctor’s bleary eyes and said, “Trust me. If I understood them, you would be the first I would tell.”
I saw her shoulders feint, an involuntary twitch that, if expressed, would turn into an offer of embrace. But she checked it, aborted it in the sinew. Something in her knew this was too great a request. We were past saying anything else. Good-bye would be absurd.
I was down the stairs in a blur of small pumping knees. The large front door of the castle was open and through it I smelled the wet cobbles of the driveway and the lingering smoke of the officer’s cigarette. He waited behind the wheel as I approached the car, a large Mercedes four-door, beading the light rain under fresh wax. He exited the car and crossed to the passenger-side door, grinning, his cigarette in his lips like an American movie star. I must have looked frightened, for his smile broadened as he opened the door for me.
“What’s the matter, honey?” he said, tossing his dying butt to the gravel. “Don’t you recognize your own long-lost mother?”
CHAPTER 48
I was silent for a long time as she drove. Feelings surfaced, firing wildly inside my skull. But it wasn’t like my first rediscovery of her at the nightclub. My feelings had cooled, coiled in me like things apart, parasites of the heart. Had I been normal, I would have looked from eyes at a different height, the promontory of a matured body. I would have known that I had outgrown her. But I still felt as I appeared, small and adrift. She kept looking at me, her cap now off, the dark auburn roots of her short bleached hair guiding me back to something familiar. But her eyes betrayed nothing. No fondness or disgust. Only assessment. Even though the dead do not age, they do change, like cliffs and riverbeds change. We are carved and pitted from the inside and so can be new to one another.
“Where are you taking me?” I finally asked, feeling an ease in so general a question.
“Out of Germany. The party is ending here. Everyone who’s even remotely entertaining is being rounded up.”
“And how did you find me?”
“Your father told me.”
Father. The word was a cold breath that inflamed my embers. I choked my ambition down and turned hard upon my mother.
“Why do you wear that uniform? Are you one of them now?”
“This? It’s a costume,” she said, trying to smile. “We’ve always been fond of dressing up in this country. I used to fake my lust under Weimar. Now I fake my compliance under the Reich.”
“Well, they’re not faking theirs.”
“I had no idea you had such an interest in politics.”
And she meant it in the etymological sense, in its most basic meaning, as in the business of people, the affairs of the living. The situation in Germany had nothing to do with us. We were bystanders. Ghosts.
“I thought I raised you to be more interesting than that.”
“Raised me? Jesus Christ. Mollusks show more interest in their offspring.”
I was surprised when she slowed the car to the shoulder. She breathed deeply, staring through the mottled surface of the windshield. She turned to me. Her eyes were full of tears. Real tears. It seemed impossible that I could wound her.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
I gave it to her and she gently placed it inside her tunic.
“You feel that?”
Her heart beat, a solid rhythmic thrum beneath my cold palm.
“And this.”
She drew my finger over her cheek and caught the moisture there. Her tears were warm.
“I’m no different than you, Maddy. I worked the same charm on myself that I did on you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I wanted you to be strong. To fend for yourself and grow strong the way I grew strong.”
“Abandonment is not strength.”
“Neither is self-pity. Your grandmother did not want to teach me this charm. She called it die Art Fluch. The kind curse. She warned that the dead awakened were not less themselves but more so. But I thought I saw myself in you. The same hard green reed of a girl that I was.”
“But a girl,” I said, looking at her. “Always a girl. Never like you, never ripe. Never a woman.”
“What was I to do? Tell me. Could you watch your own child die?” I looked away. Mutter’s thick fingers ebbing heat on the shower room floor. His lips that had refused a last desperate breath. “Look at me,” she said. I raised my head. “You understand, Maddy. I can see it in your eyes.”
We were both silent then. It wasn’t some maudlin spring awakening, an end of act swelling of waxing strings. It was more an assessment of our situation. Germany was lost to her as Hollywood would have to be reinvented for me. My only hope of a new discovery, a new venture, was in her.
“Then teach me,” I said to the upholstery. “Teach me how.”
And she drove.
CHAPTER 49
I told her my sensory ability had been spotty at best, based on recall more than direct stimulus. Smells seemed somewhat easier to achieve, tethered as they are to memory. But taste was nearly impossible. Her basic premise was simple enough: reality is defined by one’s attention. I should have known this, she said, purporting to work in an industry that survived on the manufacture of perception. Wasn’t I a creature of Hollywood? I told her that I felt like such a creature because I had obviously associated with Hollywood’s limitations. She told me to stop that. I was only limited in my ability to experience my surroundings because I believed I was limited. It was much harder to do this while alive, she conceded. Our biology was always challenging our innate gods. When I asked her—in a fairly whining tone, I’m ashamed to admit—why she hadn’t told all this to me before, she scoffed. No one, in her experience, could ever teach anything worth knowing. She said life is a strictly bespoke business. Experience the only worthy tailor. But she never said she was sorry. Then she quoted Buddhist scripture, a two-thousand-year-old koan:
While living, be a dead man.
Thoroughly dead.
Then whatever you do, just as you will,
Will be right.
We could make our flesh warm, our hearts beat, if we chose. This she said was especially convenient while fucking. She said it just like that. Fucking. And I said I doubted I would ever be attracted enough to anyone who would find me accessible in that way. She told me to keep an open mind. Experiencing new sensations was all a question of “listening” to the experience, becoming “one ear” she called it. Free of the tyranny of “what is,” we could augment our experience of anything the same way one increases the volume of a radio. It was all fiddli
ng with knobs, according to her. Tuning into what we wanted. Tuning out what we didn’t. The world was just one massive sending tower, broadcasting limitless stations, all for our listening pleasure.
We headed back to Bremen, to a small hotel by the sea where some friends of hers were waiting to sail to America. They were Jewish artists mostly, composers and set designers, someday directors who had managed to be sponsored by the payroll pledge fund. The American government didn’t seem particularly alarmed by Nazi invective but was heartily annoyed by the influx of refugees and had severely limited emigration visas. The only reliable way to get into the country was by sponsorship. Several well-known European actors and directors, working in the States, had set up a fund whereby a percentage of their studio wages went toward passage, food, even instruments and scoring paper. We were being funded by the accumulation of three marathon benefits held by Marlene Dietrich at the Cocoanut Grove. Every shake of her ass and flash of her kneecaps was another life saved.
Volker came to the dock, mingling with the marine mist. He lifted his head and nodded as our ship pulled out. His eyes were bright and I could see the outline of the terminal through them, could see people milling onto waiting boats, lifting luggage, children, the last tangible memories of their homeland. He smiled. He knew his work was done. I had no words for the feelings rising in me. I had never mourned a father before.
CHAPTER 50
We arrived back in Los Angeles on a day when the clouds were low and cold, the sidewalks chilled from a sudden rain. My mother was silent but I could see her eyes searching the gray streets for the glamour, as everyone’s eyes first search, not knowing that the only glamour this desert holds is what one brings. She had said good-bye to her friends at the dock at San Pedro. They had contracts to fulfill. We only had each other. Her eyes brightened as we drove through the stone gates at the top of Beachwood, but fell again as I pointed out Busby Berkeley’s house.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 27
