The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

But maybe why not Romania if you’d been through the camps. Everyone was dead, everyone. If you spoke Romanian, knew the streets, knew the black hearts of your fellows there as well as anywhere, maybe the idea was why bother with anywhere else?

  Still, What about Brazil? she almost said out loud.

  But Stefan Zweig had fled to Brazil and taken poison in despair, so who knew? Certainly not her uncle and Lieutenant Smith in June of 1945, as they sat smoking and speculating in front of the fire that night, concluding that Palestine was the most expedient solution; an easy gift of some scrub acres in the Middle East—what was it called then? Arabia?

  And looking back on that too, one could see that if, instead, they’d bought them all, every one of those survivors of the death camps, lovely old mansions in Oyster Bay, or beach houses in Malibu, with full-time maid service and regular junkets to, say, Monte Carlo, all expenses paid, it would have been cheap at the price compared to the cost of “Palestine.”

  But what concerned her uncle that night was less the fate of nations than how to get over to the sanitarium called St. Ottilien in the morning; and he wrote that he was greatly relieved when, after a few more cups of the Nazis’ very good brandy, Lieutenant Smith offered to requisition him a car.

  THE CAR TURNED OUT TO BE a small truck, painted white with a huge red cross, complete with a corporal as driver. St. Ottilien had been a monastery, founded in an old castle, with the white walls and red roofs of this Bavarian countryside, so begrudged its “beastly” inhabitants by her uncle. It was “suppressed,” say the histories, whatever that means, “by the Gestapo,” but reopened in 1945 to care for former death camp prisoners, informally at first.

  So informally that, when her uncle rode up in the white truck with the red cross, they greeted him with relief and flowers, thinking that finally an American soldier had come to run the place. When he finally clarified his mission—that he’d come looking for some cousins—one of the nuns looked more closely at his face.

  “Yes, of course, you look exactly like her,” she said.

  Like whom? he asked. He didn’t know these girls.

  “Like Alice,” the nun smiled.

  This uncle had been fair, the fairest in the family, with his pink cheeks and delicate nose, delicate build—it had always been the tennis team for him, never football. He left that for his two robust brothers, half brothers in fact. His own mother, delicate also, had died in childbirth. His grief-stricken father had married her grief-stricken sister. A very different girl from the first one he had chosen, but life ran along different lines in those days.

  Still, this Alice must have been lovely if she looked like this uncle. She must have had the light eyes, too, and the fine features.

  But he doesn’t describe her, just goes on:

  “When the girls entered the room, I asked them if they had any relatives in the States. They told me yes, and told me your name, Dad, and Cleveland, Ohio. I told them in my German that I was their cousin. Somehow or other, they were so stunned that it made very little impression on them.”

  How had he said it? His German must have been rudimentary at best, learned as it was in an Ohio high school from a normal-school spinster whose closest encounter with the spoken language was likely Pennsylvania Dutch. Maybe instead of “cousin,” which is Vetter, he had said “Vater,” which meant father, and maybe the girls who’d survived Auschwitz weren’t up to guessing games that morning.

  But then, “After about five minutes of conversation, Klara suddenly turned to me and asked me my name.” And when he answered—their mother’s last name, the last name of their grandparents—when he said that lost, beloved name, “they just started bawling and crying like a newborn babe.”

  Which was “wonderful,” he wrote—even miraculous, considering what these girls must have known by then about tears. How they stopped nothing, not the sewing on of the first yellow stars, which must have been shocking in itself, though not compared to what was to come. And as it came, relentlessly, stopped by no tears, not mothers’, not babies’ whom these girls had seen tossed alive into burning pits, they must have thought, after that, there were no tears left. Not for anything on earth.

  Until her uncle walked in that day, triumphant in his US Army uniform, with the news that he was their cousin, that they still had a cousin. They had come to almost believe the redefinition of themselves that had started with the yellow stars—that they were people apart, with no home, no place on earth, no cousins.

  But here was their cousin, their victorious cousin no less, and not only had he beaten their enemy, but they could see their mother in his eyes, and that’s when the tears came back.

  “They started to kiss me again and again,” her uncle wrote, “and caress me and hug me. Just knowing that they hadn’t been altogether forgotten.” Klara was in her early twenties, Alice just seventeen. She was fifteen when she was taken.

  “They were dressed nicely, but it was all they had. It was a blue print dress, the goods of which they’d managed to save. We went out and the weather was beautiful. We sat around and talked. They told me the same stories I had heard the night before from the other refugees. I had to listen to them again, but the fact that they got it off their chest was something.

  “Then we went up to their barracks, which isn’t nice, but at the same time was clean, mildly clean that is, and they showed me off to everyone. I was doing fairly well with the language, but of course had some difficulty. There was a boy, though, who had just been operated on about a week or so ago. He spoke English very well, and so he acted as our interpreter. Klara then again told me the very sad news.

  “They had worked night turn, making munitions. Twelve hours daily. They had their numbers tattooed on their arms. Their food was terrible, that is, the little they had. The prisoners lived like pigs and slept practically like them. They had every bit of their hair shaved off their entire body from head to foot, to prevent lice from breaking out.

  “Terrible, yet they once heard Radio London. While working one night, they heard some wonderful jazz music on the radio. Being in a corridor away from the main part, they explored and found that the Nazi overlord had left the radio on in his room, and it was tuned to London. The news and courage they got from that one broadcast was something. Naturally, it spread through the camp.”

  He went on then to say that Klara introduced him to her fiancé. She had met him in the DP camp, and wasn’t sure if she should marry him. She turned to her new cousin and asked him his opinion.

  “Well, I was put on the spot,” he wrote. “But I said that as neither of them now have anything, why I thought that at least they could have each other. Again, she hugged me and kissed me. From no one else alive could she have got such advice.”

  Alice told him she wanted to go to the States, not back to their home—their former home—in Hungary. She was afraid she’d see people she knew, “and they would ask her about her parents and she couldn’t face it.” Seventeen. She started to cry again.

  Klara thought maybe they should go back, just to see. There was a chance. No one had thought to talk about “afterwards,” where to meet and so on. It had all happened so suddenly, they’d been separated on a train platform in the camp, with no chance for even a word of farewell. The girls had been sent in a different direction from their parents, and told they’d be together again “right after the shower.”

  Her uncle, an American boy who’d only nights before drunk his first white wine, found himself hard pressed to advise them. He knew the truth about their chances for a visa to the States. “I told them the family would do all we could, but didn’t want to build up false hope.” He explained that if they went back to the displaced persons camp, “they’d at least have food, a bed, and some clothes to get through the winter. But if they tried to go home, they wouldn’t know what they’d have. I told them how bad things were there, and also that it was hoped that many of the camp personnel would go to Palestine.

  “But these girls definitely don
’t want to go to Palestine.”

  They were, after all, European, born and bred. Maybe they’d start, they said, by going to Romania with Klara’s fiancé. That’s where he was from, and he wanted to take them back there with him. Consie’s uncle told them he would help them, the whole family in America would help them, once civilian mail opened up. Meanwhile, he gave them what he’d managed to bring from England—“a dozen candy bars, four bars of soap, toothpaste, gum, lifesavers, three undershirts, a half dozen handkerchiefs, and socks, and a carton of cigarettes,” which you could trade for anything. Her uncle wanted to give them some money, but they told him that “money here is practically worthless.” What they really needed were shoes, which her uncle promised to send.

  It was hard to leave, he wrote. There were more tears, and the girls told him that though they were grateful for what he had brought them, “despite their need, they didn’t want those few things as much as knowing that they had really met me. They told me of a picture they have of us.”

  “Had,” they should have said. Maybe they saw it in their minds, still in a silver frame, gleaming on a sideboard, behind a sofa in a living room they forgot was no longer there.

  “I had forgotten it,” he wrote, “but I do remember the one taken many, many years ago.” Consie knew it, too—taken in a photographer’s studio, the usual affair, a Victorian palm, an art deco sofa. Her grandfather with a half-smile she’d never seen as a child. Her grandmother’s hair still dark, her uncles in short pants, her mother, a tomboy, stuck in a dress, with an oversized ribbon in her hair.

  Did Klara and Alice’s parents know that it was set in a studio? Did they think that palms and récamiers graced Middle American parlors in those days? Especially the parlors of men like her grandfather who’d left behind all that the rest of his family had held on to, in his quest for something new?

  Who knew what any of them made of any of it? America hadn’t attracted these people. Her uncle shook hands with the Romanian fiancé, who explained through the English-speaking boy that they were leaving within the next few days. “So I caught them just in time,” he wrote. “Lucky, wasn’t I?”

  Lucky, yes, indeed, a nice story. Good weather, a fortuitous meeting of young survivors, one of the battlefield, the others of the camps. But then came a “Now”—and she could almost hear the dead man take a breath.

  “Now to a more serious and sad truth which I must tell you. Here are the worst facts I can tell you, so prepare yourself for the shock which you’ve been dreading so long, because the worst has happened.

  “These girls know nothing about their parents. They do know that most of the family have not escaped the fate, not even the children. They also said that your brother, Hermann, was at Auswetz Concentration Camp with them, and as he was very strong and healthy, they have hopes that he may be alive. They do know that he escaped from the Concentration Camp.

  “So there may be some ray of hope. Not much, but maybe a thread. Please, Dad, try to take this hard news as easy as you possibly can. I could tell from your voice over the phone how anxious you were.”

  Then a few words about God’s will, a brief reference to his happy return to England, an appropriate reminder that “it is for those who still live that we must cry,” and then, “All my love.”

  Her uncle.

  CONSIE LOOKED UP. The light was finally fading on the gloom outside. How long had she been reading? The doorbell was still ringing with new guests. She held on to the letter with great care now—it had been pecked out on an old-fashioned typewriter, on crinkly thin paper, onionskin, they called it, and maybe it was. Anyway, it seemed altogether more akin to an illuminated manuscript at the Getty than to a cold computer printout.

  She tried not to imagine it arriving, tried not to see her grandfather, a reserved and formal man, walking in the door, taking off his summer jacket—the date said August—“washing up,” as he used to say, taking a drink of water, then maybe his schnapps, and then, as he sat to read the evening paper, being handed the letter.

  The letter would have been opened already, ripped open even, for her grandmother would have seen that it was from their boy in the army and read it. So definitely the drink for her grandfather, and the radio off, and silence from the two teenage boys who were still at home, as her grandfather sat to read “the worst news possible.”

  She got up, stiff now, and went back to the window. This apartment was new, built in the ex-urbs, on what had only recently been wetlands—who had allowed it? Though who didn’t allow it, in America these days?

  There was a flock of Canada geese on the lawn. She used to like the sight of them, but someone had told her that now they were just another sign of the whole imbalance, like deer.

  They were brave, though, out there in November.

  Did her grandfather know all that had happened when he read that letter? How his brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews had been killed? Everyone was used to it now; it was everywhere, the museums, the Academy Awards. All that “Never Again,” till you open the paper and read the news.

  But when did people start knowing? Her grandfather had never mentioned it, once, during her own childhood. Never said a word about his brothers and sisters, just told her of a horse that had once carried him across a flooded river, and the geese that had nipped at his heels, even when he fed them. A grandmother who would slice a raw potato and put it on his temples when his head ached.

  She had tried that once, when her own head ached. It had worked, as well as anything worked. The truth is, you can’t stop a headache, not a real one. She turned back to the letter.

  Who were these sweet girls dressed in blue, this Klara and Alice? She’d never heard their names before. They were young—Alice only seventeen. “Sometimes so old, and sometimes so young,” wrote her uncle. Did they go into Romania after all, with Klara’s fiancé? Were they caught again then, a few years later, when the Russians lowered the Iron Curtain?

  A terrible thought, though maybe they’d lived perfectly nice lives there, as most people do, most places, with husbands, children in school, work of some sort. Poverty at first, but then perhaps some measure of comfort, even relative prosperity. Had they ever written to her uncle after that, or her grandfather? She tried now to remember if her grandfather had ever mentioned them—had he? He wasn’t talking much anymore, by the time she’d gotten old enough to understand.

  “Clinically depressed,” she was told, years later. Apparently they’d even tried electric shock.

  But why hadn’t he said anything? It must have seemed unspeakable to him, but wouldn’t it have helped? Was he trying to spare her, to spare himself, from actually seeing it all? There were a few photos in an old album of his sisters, tall, elegant girls in silk, with their chic twenties hairstyles, and his brother, Hermann, who looked very much like her grandfather. A finer version, perhaps, but with that same half-smile.

  He had lived in Czechoslovakia, which he called “a democracy, a Little America,” in a letter he’d written in response to some sort of papers that her grandfather had sent, which he could have taken to the US consulate in Prague, and used to get a visa to America. That was in 1938, when he still could have sold his house and businesses—for a loss, granted—and bought passage on whatever boat was leaving, and brought his wife and daughters, his mother-in-law even, to America, right then.

  But “we are Czechs,” he wrote, “we love our country,” and then that door slammed shut, and she knew the rest of the story, or thought she did. Hermann had died in a concentration camp.

  Contradicted, though, by the letter. Which claimed that Hermann had escaped from Auschwitz—“They do know,” said the letter.

  She rifled through the papers, trying to find that bit, but the letter was long.

  “One for the road?” The cousin was back with the bourbon.

  “I don’t think so—” She had an early flight back.

  Although, on second thought, why not? It was dark outside, finally. No more spindly birche
s, no further surfeit of geese.

  She took the drink and sipped. If she had read the letter a month ago, or even last week, she could have asked her uncle. Now, the whole thing lay out there with him, six feet under, in the graveyard.

  Ironic. But life. The reason for the drink. She drank it down quickly, and slipped the letter into her bag. Maybe she’d read it again.

  Or not. The past. Over. She walked out into the freezing night.

  2

  THE SLEET HAD TURNED to snow, and they were digging their cars out the next morning as she rode to the airport, and even so, she had a momentary thought to tell the taxi to stop, turn back. Not that she could say what she would be staying for, but there is only one place in this world that is home.

  And this was it for her, the place that looked—not good exactly, but intensely familiar to her. The crumbling brick factories, the boarded-up old wooden houses with the porches half off. She knew it was blighted, miserable, decaying, but none of that could stop the chord that it still struck in her heart.

  And there was that moment in the cab when she was thinking to stay, even just a little longer, doing the math of how much Adbusters or maybe even Rolling Stone would pay her for a piece on the decline and fall of the industrial heartland. But once she put in the cost of a rental car, the thing fell apart.

  Despite the fact that hanging around a bit might have eased the loss of her uncle. A visit to the cemetery, maybe alone, and a few more nights under the covers with the out-of-date sleeping pills she’d found in a cousin’s guest room. A deep winter’s sleep going back—back, back—to the formal old dining room where they would all still be sitting, her grandparents, and her uncle, too, coming for the night.

  BUT UP AGAINST ALL THAT was the simple fact that any flight across the country is good if you’ve got a window.

  “Please have the courtesy to close your shutter so that your neighbors can watch their monitors,” they were saying over the speaker. Which she didn’t have—that “courtesy,” not even when they came in person to bug her.