Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

  Why couldn’t she confide in him about this love? Or was it even love? Could he really have been so oblivious to his sister’s being in love? Or had the fact that Knina was a well-to-do local businessman outweighed all other considerations? Was she looking for a comfortable life where she did not have to work? Had she even weighed the fact that Knina was Jewish? Or was she just her typical headstrong self, plowing ahead with what she wanted to do? He had always considered himself far from any anti-Semitism—in fact, he considered himself a philosemite—but having nothing against Jews was one thing, even being friends, while marriage was quite another. Even though Jews had become established and well-respected members of the bourgeoisie in Reichenberg, anti-Semitism was still virulent. By marrying a Jew, Resi would put herself at risk, and her children, should there be any.

  Karl knew Knina to be a good man. He respected him as a hardworking businessman and a good party member. But he could see countless conflicts and issues arise as a result of Resi’s and Knina’s different cultural and religious backgrounds. How would Knina’s family react? Would they even welcome Resi? And how would it be if they had children? Which family tradition would the children grow up with? Would they ever know who they were? Was this relationship, revealed so suddenly, strong enough to withstand all this? And make his sister happy?

  He was thinking in circles now. He could not voice his misgivings to Resi. He would be dubbed the jealous brother. Any considerations he might bring up would only breed resentment. Clearly, she had already made up her mind. He did not want a rift with his only sister, but he couldn’t congratulate her, either. At least not now.

  He brought his half-empty plate into the kitchen.

  “You’re not hungry?” his mother asked.

  “No, I don’t feel like eating.”

  “Well, I can understand that. Coming home to such news.”

  THE FOLLOWING DAYS MUST HAVE BEEN FRAUGHT WITH tension on the top floor of Tuchplatz 3, the air thick with the weight of impending tragedy and professed happiness. In his memoirs my grandfather writes that he spared his sister his objections, even though he couldn’t quiet the worries in his mind. He kept thinking about how complicated it would be should Resi have children with Guido.

  Resi married Guido Knina the following week in a civil ceremony at city hall in Reichenberg, one week after the families found out. Presumably Guido’s family had been none the wiser than Resi’s. Their marriage was a fait accompli. No time for ifs and buts.

  It must have been a plain wedding, with both families looking on askance. Only the setting was ornate: the ceremonial hall, with its wood-paneled walls; a nine-hundred-pound brass chandelier; and tall stained-glass windows from which the symbolized figures of Science, Art, Industry, and Trade gazed down. Since both bridegroom and brother-in-law were city councilmen, both families were well known in Reichenberg. Perhaps the modest affair was meant to keep the spotlight off the families’ uneasiness.

  Intermarriage was not uncommon in those days, but it still created awkwardness. Resi’s family largely ignored the Jewish component that had come into her life, such as any notion that she might go to synagogue with her in-laws or participate in their holidays. Similarly, Guido’s family kept their distance, at least initially, because Resi had not converted. That changed a year later when Resi gave birth to a son, Ludwig, in the Sanatorium Brey, a well-run hospital for minor ailments on the outskirts of town. In March 1925, her daughter, Herta, was born. The family’s happiness was complete: a boy and a girl. Everybody doted on them, especially Guido’s mother. According to my grandfather, Guido’s mother believed that healthy children were chubby children, and she stuffed Ludwig and Herta whenever she could. Resi herself wanted to have kräftige Kinder, robust children, and so they grew up to be pretty but plump, especially Herta, whose round cheeks ruled her face. She would carry all that weight until I came to know her in her fifties and sixties.

  Guido continued to run his successful textile business on Bahnhofstraße, selling fine fabrics and sewing notions to tailors and haberdashers. Contrary to his leftist politics, he was conservative in business and kept a steady customer base in the merchants of the surrounding rural communities. I still have a wad of fine wool herringbone from his store. It has the stale smell of dust now, having spent more than eighty years in closets and trunks.

  “Das ist noch aus dem Geschäft”—this is still from the store—my grandmother used to say when we fingered this fabric, which she kept in the armoire in her bedroom. Resi must have given it to her when it was one of the few gifts of value she could still make. The herringbone is of superior quality, tightly woven and a bit scratchy, perfect for the fine men’s suit it never became.

  Guido had the distinction of being the first Jew ever elected to Reichenberg’s city council, something my grandfather never noted, perhaps because this was not relevant to him. As a member of the established German and gentile majority, my grandfather would not have seen Guido’s election as remarkable. But it was noteworthy enough to be mentioned in The Jews and Jewish Communities of Bohemia in the Past and in the Present, edited by Hugo Gold and published in 1934. It was also noted that Guido’s father had been on the committee that constructed Reichenberg’s synagogue, dedicated in 1889. Up the hill from the theater and the Café Post, its onion-shaped spire took a prominent place in this picturesque city of cloth makers in the midst of the Jizera Mountains.

  UNTIL HIS OWN MARRIAGE IN 1932, MY GRANDFATHER WAS the bachelor in the family, and thus he had the time to play a prominent role in the lives of his niece and nephew, Herta and Ludwig. He became der Onkel, the Uncle. Herta had wonderful memories of the Uncle and the stories he used to tell. When he had wrapped up his work as principal of the girls’ middle school and editor of the Freie Schulzeitung, the Free School Paper, he would be up late at night in the apartment on Tuchplatz, dreaming up a story to tell Herta and Ludwig the following weekend.

  He also grew cacti in the white light of the turret room overlooking Tuchplatz. One summer night after Herta and Ludwig had already been tucked into bed, their doorbell rang. Shortly thereafter, Resi came into their room and said, “Come on, you two, get dressed again. The Uncle wants us to come over. He has something special to show us.”

  Herta and Ludwig got ready fast. Going out again after they had already been sent to bed was exciting and most unusual.

  The whole family hurried along the streets. The sun had just set. Tuchplatz was busy with people and streetcars and open restaurants. They clattered up the stairs to the Uncle’s apartment, Herta’s clogs booming through the stairwell.

  “Well, there you are.” The Uncle was waiting by the door. “Come in, come in.”

  He led them, tiptoeing, almost as if afraid to disturb someone, into the living room and on into the turret’s alcove.

  “Look, the Queen of the Night is about to open its blossom.”

  They bent over a cactus sitting on the windowsill. Its long, flat leaves, their edges scalloped, flopped out of a ceramic pot. One of those leaves had a blossom hanging off its side. It looked as if the cactus were holding out a little cup of white fur. The Uncle crouched down to be at eye level with the children and the plant.

  “Do you know what’s so special about this?” he asked.

  They shook their heads.

  “The Queen of the Night opens its blossom only once, at night. By midnight it is in full bloom, and by morning it is gone. And it smells wonderful.”

  Indeed, the Queen of the Night unfolded its white cup into a blossom that reminded Herta of a daisy, only smaller and bushier. Some of its petals hung down like a fringy skirt.

  They all sat about in the Stube, nibbling on cookies and sipping tea. Every few minutes, someone checked on the Queen of the Night. The Uncle had his camera out and moved it this way and that on the tripod, the lens pointed toward the blossom.

  “No one near it, please,” he admonished them. “I need a lot of exposure; I don’t want to use a flash.”

  Resi
sniffed the air. “Hmm, I can already smell it.”

  The kids insisted on staying until midnight even though they were feeling drowsy. At midnight, the blossom was wide open and an intensely haunting scent filled the room. Herta wasn’t sure she liked it.

  “Wonderful, this scent,” Resi kept saying. “Simply extraordinary.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Guido said. “It’s a bit too intense, don’t you think?”

  The adults went back and forth about the scent, and Herta and Ludwig ate more cookies. Eventually their parents hurried them back home, but not before promising to return the next day to check on the cactus. The following evening, Herta could hardly believe that the white blossom had wilted and was hanging off the cactus’s side, limp and brown.

  This nocturnal excursion must have happened in 1930 or 1931, when Herta was old enough to remember; when my grandfather was still a bachelor and my grandmother wasn’t around yet to steer him toward more practical pursuits; when he could afford to indulge in the tending of cacti and in the giddy joy over a rare blossom. A time when he could make Resi and Guido, Ludwig and Herta rush along the city streets on a warm summer night to climb up to the turret room to watch a white blossom spread open and release its bittersweet fragrance.

  FIRST DATE

  THREE WEEKS TO THE DAY AFTER WE MET AT MICHAEL’S party, Harry called and talked to my sister. We phone-tagged for a few days, and when we finally did speak to each other, it was such an easy-flowing conversation that I thought, Why not hang out with this guy? even though I had a festering crush on someone else I had met the previous summer.

  “How about we meet next Thursday?” Harry said.

  “Thursday? May 30?”

  “Yes, May 30.”

  I did a double take because May 30 was the evening before my birthday, but I didn’t have any other plans, so I said, “Sure, why not.”

  I never suspected that he had, in the intervening three weeks, “squeezed Michael like a lemon” and knew everything about me that Michael knew, including my birthday. It would be my twenty-second, and birthdays were still terribly important to me. I would keep a list of those who remembered, and I would be hurt by those who didn’t. Birthdays were a measure of popularity, of caring, a way to denote the depth of a friendship at a time when I was in the constant business of making friends to find my place in the world.

  We arranged to meet at the Max II, a small café in Maximilianstraße in downtown Munich. We must have fixed our date for seven or eight o’clock in the evening, since Harry had to get off work at his father’s textile business. I walked to this date, slightly late, hurrying along one of the side streets that feeds into Maximilianstraße, lugging my heavy book bag. It was still light outside. I passed newspaper boxes with headlines screaming, “Soccer Catastrophe in Belgium,” “Death in the Stadium,” “Fans Die in Heysel Rioting.” The previous day Liverpool hooligans had slaughtered more than thirty fans of the Italian soccer club FC Juventus Turin during a riot before a UEFA Cup game in Belgium’s Heysel Stadium. In my hand, I had a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which I had just read on the subway. As I hurried, I slapped the folded newspaper against my thigh. Tears were squeezing up my face, and I could feel my jaw quiver. In those weeks after my father’s death, I was shaky, and the futility of life could overwhelm me at the most inopportune moments. For my first date with Harry, I showed up crying.

  When I entered the Max II, he was already sitting at one of the small round marble tables, in a green Lacoste polo shirt and slacks, leaning back, legs apart, one foot resting on the other knee, one arm draped over an empty chair. A cigarette balanced in an ashtray, threading smoke into the air. I dumped my bag beside the chair facing him, tears pooling in my eyes. I slapped my newspaper with the bloody headline on the table. “Can you believe this?”

  He studied me while I sat down, then took a quick drag from the cigarette, and said, as he exhaled, “It is unbelievable.”

  I wrung my hands in my lap; a tear trickled down my face. Deep breath, deep breath. I can’t completely dissolve here.

  I said, “I just can’t believe people would get so . . . that they would take someone and lift him up and push him down on the spikes of an iron fence. Do you know how high those fences are? I mean, it’s one thing to trample each other in a frenzy, or hit someone, but to spear someone?” I was gulping.

  “Well, I’ve always considered the whole thing—soccer—barbarism,” Harry said. “It’s like the Roman gladiator games. The crowd comes to see blood.”

  Normally, I would have argued with that, but now my tears welled up anew because I had to admit that ultimately he was right.

  Don’t look at the newspaper. Breathe.

  “What would you like to drink?” he asked, surveying the café for a waitress. I had suggested the Max II because it was an everyday sort of place where old ladies stopped after their shopping rounds. They would sit alone at their tables, sipping coffee, dissecting a slice of torte, considering, with some satisfaction, their pile of purchases. Old ladies have a comforting presence; they steady the world, something I needed very much during that time. Now, however, the Max II was full of students and the after-work crowd.

  “Would one of these be okay?” Harry asked, tipping his head toward the pear-bellied green bottle of Perrier that stood on the table, next to a thin, tall glass of fizzing water, a lemon slice wedged on its rim.

  I nodded. He waved the waitress to our table and ordered for me.

  Thank you, I thought, for being matter-of-fact. Don’t say anything about my tears, or I will slide down, down, and I don’t want to go there; I don’t want the dread that’s spreading in my chest to take over. Let it pass; just let it pass.

  I had to be quiet for a while, breathe; maybe this wave of despair would peter out, would not pull me down. I got my cosmetic bag out, searching for my lip balm. Harry leaned forward and reached over to squeeze my fumbling hand. For a second his dark brown eyes held mine; then he released my hand, grabbed the newspaper from my side of the table, and settled back into his chair to study it.

  Those warm brown eyes had felt good. I took another deep breath and applied the lip balm.

  The waitress came and set my Perrier down with a clink. I took a sip. I could barely swallow; my throat felt sore.

  Drink some more, I told myself. That will smooth out that lump in the throat. Maybe eat something—that will help, too. Concentrate on ordinary things, food and water, not big things.

  Harry must have read my thoughts, because he looked up from the paper and said, “Have you eaten?”

  I shook my head, still unable to say anything without risking a sob, so he pushed the little menu card my way. Something warm would be good, I thought. The screeching of a passing streetcar came in through the café’s open door.

  I pointed to the quiche Lorraine on the menu, and Harry got up in search of the waitress.

  Eventually, after I had sipped enough Perrier and had eaten some of the quiche, we talked. Harry was not a soccer fan; in fact, he wasn’t into sports at all, so he could not offer any explanations as to how soccer fans could wind themselves up into such a violent frenzy. He also didn’t drink; I knew that already from Michael’s birthday party. He didn’t like the taste of alcohol, he said; plus, he preferred to keep his wits about him, so a drunken brawl was not something he could relate to, either.

  I, on the other hand, was a soccer fan and followed the fortunes of Munich’s premier team, FC Bayern München. My tongue relaxed as I told Harry that I had attended a few soccer games, traveling to Munich’s Olympic Stadium on the subway, surrounded by packs of hardcore fans with their tattoos, emblemed jeans, leather jackets, and impossibly long shawls in red and white stripes, the colors of Bayern München. He followed my tales with raised eyebrows. Clearly, this did not fit with the image of the student who wore pumps and short white skirts and carried her books in a black patent leather tote.

  After we had talked and eaten, I felt a bit calmer, and it must have b
een around ten o’clock when Harry suggested we go to Schumann’s.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t like Schumann’s. Let’s just stay here.”

  He frowned. Schumann’s was the club in Munich at the time, down the street from the Max II. Anybody who was anybody hung out there. You didn’t get in if you didn’t know somebody. Inside Schumann’s was simply a bar and stark cream-colored walls and mahogany furniture, no dance floor or piano. It was owned by a guy whose name was indeed Schumann and who had a keen eye for running a top-notch place. Unlike other clubs, which came and went, his blossomed and never went out of fashion. I had been there only a few times, with a friend who sort of knew people and could talk herself into places, and had been put off by the middle-aged men who sat at the mahogany counter in tight leather pants, their wallets strategically visible, trying to pick up girls. I didn’t quite under-stand the attraction of Schumann’s, and I wasn’t interested in leaving the cozy Max II for Schumann’s and its glare. In my patched-up state, I didn’t want to be under the scrutiny of the “in” crowd.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to Schumann’s?” Harry asked again.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “I’m going to be in trouble,” he said, leaning back.

  “Why?”

  “I asked Schumann to hold my table from ten on, and he usually doesn’t like doing that. He’s going to be mad.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? Let’s go, then.”

  “No, no, you clearly don’t want to go. It’ll be all right.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you tell me the first time around? If I’d known you had reserved a table! Come on, let’s go.” Now I felt bad, but Harry wouldn’t budge, and so we continued to sip Perrier at the Max II.

  A little past eleven thirty, he said, “Now, however, we do have to leave. I have a place I want to go with you.”

  This time I didn’t object. We wandered down Maximilianstraße. Coming up on the opera, he said, “Wait a moment—I have to get something from my car.”