Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

I didn’t bump into him. Those cool imagined moments that would mask an embarrassing machination never happen. Eventually I decided just to stand about on the wide sidewalk of Ludwigstraße, waiting, plain as plain can be, scanning pedestrians. And then, a good twenty minutes after class had ended, when surely he was going to miss me, I heard my name being called. I turned and saw that he had pulled up in his silver-blue Honda Civic. He was leaning out the passenger window while other cars were honking because this was a no-parking, no-stopping zone.

  Of course he wouldn’t pick me up walking; he’d be driving!

  I ran over and slid into the passenger seat.

  “What were you doing there?” he asked, as he put the car in gear and the broken exhaust roared.

  I could not keep a grin from spreading across my face. “Waiting for you,” I said.

  “You knew I was coming?”

  “I did.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I just did.”

  SPAIN

  IN EARLY AUGUST, AT THE END OF THE SUMMER semester, I left for Spain. I had signed up for a month-long Spanish-language course in Malaga and tacked on a week of sightseeing in Madrid. Back in March, before my dad died and before I met Harry, after a year of intensive study, I had passed the Latinum exam. The Latinum is the equivalent of five years of high school Latin. At that time, the state of Bavaria (capital city: Munich) required the Latinum as a prerequisite for a master’s degree in any of the social sciences or humanities. I was majoring in American Studies, and thus I had to catch up on the Latin my parents had deliberately not exposed me to in high school, having enrolled me instead in the science-focused curriculum with the argument that Latin was “a waste of time.” After passing the Latinum, I wanted to do something with my newly acquired understanding of the foundation of all romance languages. Since I already knew French well, I figured it made sense to learn Spanish.

  Harry drove me to the airport, and, with a touch of melodrama, I gave him our first kiss as we said good-bye. I left for Spain with the security of a man by my side, someone who wanted to be with me, someone who cared what I was up to, yet I was free to examine what would come my way. What came my way were men. At the language school, I was assigned to a beginners’ class of six students, and the only other girl in the class was not staying at the school’s dormitory. It was therefore a given that I should be friends with the guys.

  All four of them were intriguing, fun, and worthy of a crush, but none of them measured up to the substance of Harry. Still, those weeks in Malaga, I always had a guy to do something with, and we even went on outings as a group. Like attending a bull-fight. Or traveling to see the magnificent Alhambra in Granada. Those weeks in Malaga, I lived a life in sunshine. Always a man by my side to protect me from whatever a woman traveling alone might need protection from. Always Harry in the background to keep me safe from foolish entanglements.

  Twice a week, Harry and I had a phone date. He would call the students’ phone in the downstairs hallway of the dorm at the agreed-upon hour, and someone would holler out to the pool, “Your boyfriend’s on the phone!” I did not necessarily wait by the phone; I was often too distracted by the fun at the pool to mind the time.

  All the guys knew I had this boyfriend, and I even told one of them about the possible complexities of that relationship. Sitting in his dorm room, I told him that it wasn’t all straightforward with “my boyfriend,” that Harry was Jewish and that any kind of relationship with a non-Jewish girl—and, worse, a German girl (never mind my being half-American)—would be frowned upon by the entire Jewish community in Munich, to say nothing of his parents. And my family wouldn’t be too thrilled, either, given the story of my great-aunt Resi.

  “And how do you want to handle that?” the guy asked.

  I laughed. “Come on. I’ve only known him for a few months.”

  “Yes, but why put your heart on the line for something you know can’t go anywhere?”

  Why indeed? Was I really putting my heart on the line? In part, I distrusted this guy’s questioning—if I hadn’t had this boyfriend, would he have been interested in me? And was he therefore questioning my relationship?

  At this point, the Jewish/non-Jewish issue was an intellectual exercise for me. It was interesting to talk about, a societal issue to grapple with, although I did not understand at the time how momentous the societal barriers could be. It made the relationship interesting, dangerous, even, but it was not something between Harry and me. We hadn’t even talked about it.

  It was around us. That first thought that I could not possibly marry a Jew had been, after all, just a thought. It had come from the head, not the heart, and the heart was moving steadily and undeterred toward where it needed to be, no matter what talk was going on in my head or in other people’s heads.

  After leaving Malaga, I spent a quiet week in Madrid, wandering the Prado and going out with a friend of a friend, a Spanish lawyer who took me to the disco—a villa on the outskirts of Madrid that didn’t open until midnight. Except for that one night dancing at the villa, I spent my evenings on my hotel bed, reading O Jerusalem!, which Harry had given me before I left. It seemed fitting to be reading the history of the creation of the state of Israel in another hot and dusty country, the very country of the Inquisition that had sought to eradicate the Jews so many centuries ago. I went on to read Exodus, the story of the aftermath of the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jewish people, which I had bought myself. I lay on the crocheted coverlet of the bed and heard the snoring of another hotel guest from an adjacent room. It was my father’s sound. I hadn’t heard anyone snore since he had died. The void he left behind was so palpable that night I got lost in it, and I couldn’t continue reading about death and despair in Exodus.

  The next morning, I called my mother and she said, “You know, this guy Harry called again yesterday when he couldn’t get ahold of you.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I did speak to him later.”

  “He calls an awful lot,” she said. “You must mean a lot to him.”

  “And he to me,” I answered.

  THE TALK

  ONE EVENING A FEW DAYS AFTER I HAD RETURNED from Spain, Harry sat me down. He had picked up grilled chicken wings from the smoked-up neighborhood Gasthaus where, he claimed, they made the best ones, or at least had the best barbecue sauce. His new apartment was still unfurnished. I sat on the pseudocouch friends had lent him: two foam mattresses and two bolster pillows that were meant as a backrest but kept falling off. Harry squatted opposite me on the living room’s carpeted floor, between us the chicken wings in their foil packet and two bottles of Coca-Cola.

  “I have to tell you something,” he began. “I don’t want you to have false expectations.”

  We faced each other over the food. I waited. He looked me straight in the eye, but the words would not come.

  I said, “You were going to tell me that you can’t marry me.”

  It was as if a pinprick had deflated a balloon. Harry stared at me. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve known all along. It was obvious from the very first day I met you that you were first and foremost a Jew, and that you wouldn’t marry someone who wasn’t Jewish.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “Look,” I said, “why should we give up on something now when we don’t even know we would want to get married? Plus, you know that I’m leaving for America in two years, when I’m finished with my master’s.”

  “I know you’re going to America, but I don’t think you understand what this means—people can’t know about us.” He opened the foil packet, peeled a few wings off the pile, and handed them to me on a plate. “Here,” he said. “The smallest are the best.”

  I spread two napkins on my lap and started nibbling. The wings had the ultimate taste of flesh—juicy and charred, layered with the spicy tang of the barbecue sauce. Harry dug into his own pile, handing me a new supply of wings whenever I pushed my freshly gnawed-off bones to
the side of my plate.

  For a while we ate in silence. Then he said, “My parents can’t know about us. My father would say Kaddish if he knew.”

  I looked at him, puzzled. He wiped his mouth, took a swig of Coke, and explained, “Kaddish is the prayer for the dead.”

  This seemed melodramatic to me. I wasn’t going to go there. I said, “So how is this going to work?”

  “We will have to make it work.”

  “What if they come here? To see your new apartment?”

  “I showed it to them while you were in Spain. And they never come over.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. I keep my personal life to myself.”

  “But you work with your father. How is he not going to know?”

  “I have all these female friends who call the store all the time. He thinks I have a harem.”

  “Well, I won’t call.” I rubbed my fingers on one of the napkins, but I needed something moist to remove the sticky sauce.

  “Come,” he said. “I think those citrusy towelettes are in the bag in the kitchen.”

  We dumped the wing bones into the tinfoil. As he folded the foil into a packet, he said, “If you need to call me, call me. My father wouldn’t know the difference. He thinks Nicola is the one. In his eyes, Nicola is the ultimate shiksa.”

  I had met Nicola; she was the quintessential Fräuleinwunder: beautiful, blond, and blue eyed. She certainly fit the stereotype of the shiksa, the non-Jewish girlfriend of a Jewish guy.

  At least I had dark hair.

  As I followed him into the kitchen, I said, “What do you tell your parents when they ask whom you’re going out with?”

  “I say ‘friends.’”

  “Don’t your parents ask who your friends are?”

  “Well, some of them they know, but I’ve said ‘friends’ often enough that they know not to ask. Look, I’ve been living on my own for two years now. I don’t have to account for my whereabouts.”

  He rummaged through the plastic Gasthaus bag that was sitting on the counter. “Here,” he said, handing me a little packet with a lemon on it. “Those take the smell off.” I leaned against the counter, rubbing each finger with the moist wipe. A tiny cut on my index finger that I had forgotten began to sting.

  “Aside from my parents,” Harry continued, as he stuffed the foil package into the garbage beneath the sink, “we have to be careful which of my friends know.”

  “Because of what they think?”

  “No, I don’t care what they think. Either they’re with me or they’re not. The issue is whether they can keep their mouths shut. You know how small the community is. All you need is one tongue wagging, and my mother will hear about it and will start nagging.”

  He got another two Cokes out of the fridge, and we stood leaning against the kitchen counter for a while, drinking straight from the bottles. The kitchen was bare except for the L-shaped counter, stove, sink, and fridge that previous tenants had left. The window looked out on the walkway-balcony that led to the front door.

  After a few gulps of Coke, Harry said, “It also means you can’t answer the phone here.”

  “Why would I answer your phone?”

  “Who knows? Maybe your mother needs to reach you.”

  “Well, then she’ll leave a message and I’ll call her back.”

  “You think that will work?”

  “It will have to.”

  And with that, we had made a pact, though not one that we detailed and signed, or even discussed much. Like any big decision in life, it was what it was and we both understood. We would be together for two years until I left for America.

  In a way, I did not mind not being integrated into his society and meeting only a select group of his friends. It meant I would remain my own person. I was not going to be vetted as Harry’s girlfriend and potential wife. We could just be lovers and figure out who we were as a couple. We would not have to worry about how the rest of the world saw us. We already knew how they saw us: he was the Jew, the child of survivors, and I was the German shiksa.

  That year Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began on Sunday evening, September 15. I had worked my student job at a local newspaper that day, and Harry and I had agreed that I would spend the night at my mother’s. I knew this was a big holiday, so I wanted to do something special for Harry. He would be away at synagogue in the evening and later at his parents’ house, so I let myself into the apartment (I had a key by then). I had bought a dozen long-stemmed red roses and a rectangular vase (nothing too feminine) and arranged them right there on the floor in the entryway, where he would see them upon coming home. I leaned a card saying, “Happy New Year. Love, Annette” on the vase and closed the door, smiling to myself.

  ISRAEL

  IN EARLY MARCH 1986, HARRY AND I TRAVELED TO Israel together, as he wanted to show me the country that meant so much to him. He left ahead of me to tend to some business, and I was to follow with his friend Markus who, like me, wasn’t Jewish but was curious to visit Israel. Markus and Harry had been friends since sixth grade.

  My suitcase was stuffed with goods to smuggle into Israel for Harry’s friends, things that were terribly expensive there—an answering machine, stereo equipment, a camera.

  “They are not going to suspect you,” Harry had said. “You and Markus will look like the typical German Holy Land tourists.” Markus was up for it, sporting his usual mischievous grin, and I was amused.

  To this day, flights from Munich to Tel Aviv leave from a special security terminal because the Bavarian government is terrified that something like the Munich Massacre of 1972, when PLO terrorists murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games, could happen again. Indeed it had happened again, only three months before Markus and I were traveling, when three PLO terrorists had opened fire on the El Al counter at the airport in Vienna, killing two and injuring thirty-nine people. Vienna wasn’t that far from Munich. Harry had good friends there. Largely forgotten was the 1970 terror attack at Munich Airport itself, when an Arab gunman had opened fire on a freshly arrived El Al plane, killing one Israeli and wounding several others.

  I wasn’t particularly worried about venturing into this realm of possible terror attacks; on the contrary, I was intrigued to experience what it was all about. At Munich Airport, Markus and I lugged our bulging suitcases along several long, drafty corridors until we reached the special check-in hall for flights to Israel, where we were asked the kinds of security questions that are customary in the post-9/11 world but were unusual then: Had we packed our own luggage? Had anybody given us anything to carry? Had our luggage been in our possession the whole time? We must have given the right answers, because we passed through security just fine.

  At Ben Gurion Airport, we stood by the conveyor belts that discharged the luggage, then carried our bags past the row of customs inspectors, where suitcases were heaped on the inspection tables, their contents spilling this way and that. One customs officer was peering into a camera. Tourists were arguing. We were stopped by another officer, who asked what our plans were and whom we were visiting, and when we answered that we were touring the Holy Land, he let us pass.

  For two weeks, Harry, Markus, and I drove around the country, from Tel Aviv to the north, to Eilat in the south, and back to Jerusalem in the middle. We rode in a little Renault 4. I sat in the back while Harry and Markus bickered up front.

  “You idiot! I can’t believe you missed that exit.”

  “You can’t even drive a car.”

  “You have absolutely no idea.”

  On and on it went. Their volley of insults stressed me out. At first I tried to make peace, arbitrating from the back bench, until I realized that this was their way of being friends and all that bickering was good-natured. I had not been inside a male friendship before.

  I wanted to explore the sites of the wars I had studied, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Lebanon War, so I persuaded Harry to ride the potholed road along the Syrian bor
der in the Golan Heights until we ran up a dirt road and found ourselves on top of an Israeli bunker. Three orange-eating soldiers clambered out, asking what the hell we were doing there, and in the end invited us down below to look at Syria through their telescope: all I could see were grazing sheep. They advised us to take the military road that ran along the border fence, as it had fewer potholes.

  On we drove along the Lebanese border, Harry muttering to himself how dangerous this was, until he was able to pick up a hitchhiking Israeli soldier while I marveled at the green mountains of Lebanon and, later, at the cliffs by the sea where Lebanon and Israel meet.

  TWO YEARS EARLIER, IN 1984, THE YEAR BEFORE HE DIED, MY dad had been one of those Holy Land tourists and had traveled to Israel on a weeklong trip that our priest had organized. My mother had not been interested in such a pilgrimage, so my dad had taken Oma along. A pilgrimage was an unusual thing for both of them, since they were not religious, but Israel they wanted to see.

  In a way I was on my own pilgrimage now, traveling through the Holy Land with images of my father in my mind: posing in front of the Baha’i Temple in Haifa, standing on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, laughing while rubbing Dead Sea mud on his body.

  In Haifa, my father’s family had relatives, not blood relations but a connection that reached back to Reichenberg. A first cousin of Guido, Martha Weiss, lived there, along with her daughter, Claire. As a young woman, Martha had come to Palestine via Switzerland before the Nazis had claimed all of Czechoslovakia.

  Oma, who came from a small family, loved keeping connections with far-flung relatives and thus had kept a regular correspondence with Martha and later, when Martha couldn’t write anymore, with Claire. Oddly enough, Oma balked at leaving the bus tour she and my dad had been on to visit Martha and Claire in Haifa, even though the visit had been tentatively arranged. Maybe Oma truly didn’t feel well as she claimed, or maybe she got caught in her own web of keine Umstände machen, not wanting to ask for any extras from the tour company, as she was prone to do, putting the smooth operations of the tour above her own interests. Or maybe she was just shy or had some other trepidation. Maybe coming face-to-face with the past, with another émigré, displaced like her, was too much and would have broken the nonchalant atmosphere of the bus tour. In any case, they did not visit, and my father, disinterested as he always was in any relations, did not push for the visit to happen.