The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  What—close her blind on the view that Icarus had died for, so that her so-called neighbors could binge-watch Friends?

  “It’s against my religion,” she’d finally taken to saying, and that seemed to work, even with the most militant of the flight attendants.

  Not that they cared much anymore, not like they used to, and she was left to wonder, as they flew over the part of the Midwest where the fields get round, did people escape from Auschwitz?

  She’d never heard anything about that. She’d read her share in the past—who hadn’t? Drawn to that half-pornographic cult of cruelty, those tall blond Nazis with their boots and whips and dogs—they even wore the skull and crossbones on their collars, she’d read somewhere. Death in person, and Auschwitz was their Acropolis, their Rome. As far as she knew, you went in on the train and out through the chimney. You only survived if you somehow lived it out.

  But—she pulled out the letter and read it again.

  “They also know nothing of Hermann, but he was at Auswetz Concentration Camp with them, and as he was very strong and healthy, they have hopes that he may be alive.”

  That was spoken, and then written, in August of 1945, when hope was still a possibility. People were still creeping out of the camps, or even the woods. She’d met a German in Brazil, an officer on the Eastern Front, who’d taken three years to limp back from Russia. Clutching a crust of bread that he didn’t let out of his sight for a full year, even in the bath, till they got on the boat to Brazil.

  “They do know that he escaped from the Concentration Camp.”

  What did that mean? How did they know? Primo Levi hadn’t said anything about escape from Auschwitz. There wasn’t any escape in Life Is Beautiful or Schindler’s List. Of course those were all constructs, and even the brilliant Levi was writing with hindsight and a story, but these girls were telling it the way it was, right then and there, in 1945, to a man who didn’t even know how to spell the name yet.

  So did Hermann escape? And who would know? Why hadn’t she read this letter before? That is, maybe she had, years ago, but why hadn’t she been interested? Does it take a death? Does it take a voice from the grave to toll like a summons?

  If she’d paid attention before, she could at least have asked her uncle the girls’ last names. Or if he ever saw them again? And what happened to Hermann? Did anyone know?

  She closed her eyes on all that brown down below on the ground, all that gray. It was late November in America, coast to coast, though not in California. That was the thing about the place. It was never November. The sun would be shining when she got there, and the bougainvillea flowering, pink, orange, magenta. No one has to go to sea. Jump off a bridge, maybe, only they don’t have bridges out there either. Only a freeway overpass, and how do you get there, and where do you leave your car?

  Because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about it. Life has a way of going to seed out there. All those ideas, all that time, all those screenplays, in every waiter’s back pocket, not just yours—and then, statistically, nothing in the end. Not even seasons to mark it. You lie down by the pool, as someone put it, and wake up old.

  They were in the West now, flying over—where? New Mexico? The pilots used to tell you, but now no one wants their screen time interrupted. But something was sparkling down there, not just a frozen river, which would have been lovely enough, but something pink, red, like crystal. It looked like a city, lost in the wastes.

  Something still undiscovered in this world? Something still to be found? Was it possible?

  And then came the flat-out sand of Nevada, and finally the artificial green of profligate water use, which meant first Vegas, then Palm Springs, and finally LA. The always half-desperate touchdown, funneling them into the truly bad airport, the crowds, confusion, traffic, and finally, mismarked but welcome, the road to the beach, through the strip mall slums on Lincoln she’d come to know so well. The cheapest gas stations and car washes, the good fish taco stand with its lines of gardeners and bricklayers interspersed with hipsters out from New York. The half-lit, expansive fabric store still trying to sell gold brocades from the forties. The old Fox Theatre where her husband had once shown his Brazilian film, now a permanent “swap meet,” filled with China’s worst toys and the oversized flannels the Mexican kids seemed to like. Then the discount shoe place where, every once in a while, she could get the children the shoes they actually wanted. Now being remodeled into a Whole Foods, so that’s what was happening to the back side of Venice these days.

  And then finally, the turnoff, marked by a giant penguin offering cheap dentistry—why, though? A penguin?

  And yet, over the years, it had come to make its own sense, it promised calm and cool, and more to the point for her, led to the ramp away from it all, down to the Pacific Coast Highway, where, with one simple turn, you left all the grubby commerce behind you and confronted instead the great vast blue.

  There were even dolphins, some days, right off the road, as if all was well. And maybe it was for them, it was her fondest hope, and the sun was shining, the surf was up, but who in the whole round world were Klara and Alice? She called her mother as soon as she got home, but all she could say was that she thought they’d written once from Vienna, in the fifties.

  Still, Consie had kept her grandmother’s old address book, and now she dug it out. A lot of the numbers were archaic. Some had only five digits, others names instead of area codes. Riverside 7. Trafalgar 9. But finally, she found one, scrawled in blue ink in the margins, that looked possible. She dialed and got a distant cousin who vaguely remembered her name.

  Life had worked out well for this cousin. She was married, with children, a good job, or maybe no job, no need for a job. Consie didn’t remember afterwards. She wasn’t really listening, until the talk turned to the dead.

  Yes, this cousin had heard of Klara and Alice, but had no idea where they were now, or even if they were still alive. She confirmed that they were Hermann’s nieces, and had been in Auschwitz. She mentioned a few last names, but no cities or even continents. Anyone who might have known was likely “gone,” she said.

  “By the way, though,” she added, “speaking of Hermann, did you see the videotape that his daughter Magda made?”

  3

  IT CAME IN THE MAIL, no longer a videotape, but a small, thin DVD. Consie slipped it into the player with trembling fingers. She’d known Magda, as a poor relative from Canada, who came with her sister every year or so, to see Consie’s grandparents. “Uncle and Auntie,” they called them.

  They were hairdressers and dry cleaners in their new lives, these women. They would rumble in, with their Eastern European husbands and old cars. They had children—Canadian children, who didn’t play baseball—and numbers on their arms. It was their own fault in a way, though, she’d vaguely gathered. They could have gotten out in time, but refused—“We are Czechs. We love our country.” Magda had been studying music in Vienna when the Nazis marched in. She and her sisters spoke several languages, Consie’s mother had told her, and that’s what had saved them. She grew up thinking that only the uneducated died at Auschwitz.

  Magda and her sisters cried every time they saw her grandfather. “Uncle!” They would embrace the stiff old man with tears rolling down their faces. That was in the fifties, the early sixties. They were all dead now, and it brought Consie a shock of pleasure to see Magda again, alive and well, sitting on a chair—presumably in her apartment in Toronto, in front of some pictures, her grandchildren, she told the interviewer. She had nine.

  She looked lovely, with her hair done in an elaborate bouffant, dressed in a vaguely European suit, with plenty of jewelry, rings, bracelets, necklaces, perhaps to make a point. She had not just survived: she had prevailed. Behind her on the wall was a modern painting, school of Mondrian, it looked like, or maybe Klee—had it belonged to her parents? Had she brought it from Europe?

  It turned out she had, but as the camera pulled focus, Consie saw not an avant-garde abstr
act, but a sort of Renoir girl.

  Still, it was art. “Are you ready?” asked the interviewer, offscreen, in one of those therapy voices. Her hand came into view, proffering Kleenex.

  But Magda shook her head—Magda! No Kleenex for her. And then she started to talk.

  “Ve had a beautiful childhood”—what did they call that in drama class? Hollywood has a good name for that. The setup? You make it so terrific that it’s clear you’re heading for a fall.

  Too clear—which was the case here. Consie almost didn’t want to hear about the loving grandparents, the aunties and uncles, the cousins, the lunches, the dinners, the sleigh rides. The friends all over town, all over everywhere, all religions—everyone was happy. Magda grew up in the village where they’d all been born, in a big house, with nice neighbors. Everything was fine.

  Except that the strangely hypnotic voice was already screaming on the radio in the background by then, and they’d seen the newsreels at the movies—“Heil Hitler!” Everyone shouting, singing, marching, arms raised together. Thousands and thousands, soldiers, girls in dirndls, boys in lederhosen, people lining the streets.

  “Ridiculous!” Magda’s father—the Hermann of the letter—concluded. “Look at that mustache—preposterous! He looks like Charlie Chaplin, he’s a joke, the Germans will never put up with him, he’ll be gone in a month.”

  Which made sense—much more sense than what in fact came to pass. But Hermann had read Kant, not Nietzsche, nor was he a man of storm and wind. The breezes he felt in those days were still the gentle ones that blew in from Prague, the capital of his own country, a democracy that had sprung from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, young and new, a sort of dream place, a democracy like America, as he would write his brother, but with culture.

  Music, art, and to back it all up, the businesses, which for Hermann and his family were thriving. There is mention of grand houses on both sides of the shifting Hungarian border. As for Hermann himself, it was farms, orchards, and a grain dealership. He and his wife would, upon occasion, travel to Baden to take the waters. His daughters were studying music in Vienna.

  Though what they should have been doing—but how do you fast-forward? Either that or play it back and change everything—how easy it could be. A few bullets, well placed, or even a sustained and organized campaign to get people out of there, to Uganda or Nevada, the top of a mountain or a valley where the sun never shines. It would have been better, but instead, life went on, Magda was saying, 1936, 1937.

  Eventually 1938. Hitler was still shouting in Germany, but still dismissible in Czechoslovakia. She and her sister were home from Vienna for spring holidays when her father received the “affidavit,” as they called it, from the States, from Consie’s grandfather, Hermann’s brother, guaranteeing a million dollars’ backing for him in America.

  Whatever that meant, the million dollars, which her grandfather, a prosperous merchant in a small Ohio town, could not have mustered. Still, he had one of those nice old rambling Midwest houses that would hold his brother and family, and more, any of them who could get out, and he could feed, even employ them, and his congressman knew it and must have filled in the papers with whatever figure it took. And Hermann could have sold his house and his businesses right then, and booked passage, first class even, on one of the ships that was sailing that spring.

  But instead, he went walking in his orchards with his eldest daughter. It had moved him greatly, he told her, that his brother in America had gone to such trouble for him. Magda was sixteen then, it was a Sunday, and they’d driven out in a taxi to visit his farms outside of town, as was their custom, and the sun was shining. The fruit trees, apples, pears, but mainly plums were snowy with blossoms. Amid the flowers, white, pink, and that incomparable plum purple, he’d turned to her.

  “Look how beautiful it is!” he said. “Nothing bad could ever happen here, you’ll see.”

  And he folded his affidavit away.

  And she and her sister Gabi went back to Vienna the next day, and resumed their study of piano and violin. They lived in Dr. Krugerheim’s pension, along with other comme il faut young ladies from the provinces. They loved Vienna, loved their studies, the music, the art. The daily strolls along the Danube, the Kaffe and Sachertorte at the Hotel Sacher itself. They had friends, girls like them with well-off papas and pretty mothers in Prague, in Budapest, in Bucharest. Life was beautiful, except that while they’d been home, strolling with their fathers amongst their fruit trees, the prime minister of Austria had resigned, and Hitler had annexed Austria. That was Austria’s natural state, he’d stated. Now it too would be part of the glorious Thousand-Year Reich.

  Which was fine with most Austrians, even better, at least at first. After World War I, they’d been living in a state of almost suspended animation. Their old Austro-Hungarian Empire had been dismembered, and though there was a general agreement that the structure had been obsolete, there was also a sense that history had passed them by.

  Which was nothing, however, to the unemployment. It hit twenty, then thirty percent—one out of three men not working. Men who’d fought in the war, lost their brothers, their friends, their limbs, and come home with the shakes, to no jobs.

  It made no sense to them then, all that fighting, all that dying, until they went out into the streets and heard the cheers and the singing. “One People, One Nation, One Leader!”—why not? Hitler was one of theirs, he’d been born and raised in Austria, and his dream was, on the face of it, beautiful. A Thousand-Year Reign of the strong and the brave, a complete regeneration, a whole new world that would be theirs if they had the will to seize it. True, he had forced their elected leader from office and sent in the Wehrmacht—but on the other hand, there were already new jobs, lots of jobs, as the shuttered steel and iron works threw open their doors and cranked up their machines to fill German orders for tanks and guns.

  It was a new beginning, a new destiny; but firmly based in tradition, so even the old folks were happy. It came from deep within, who they were, and had always been. Only now, the true extent of their latent grandeur would be reached. It would not be easy, and there would be blood. But that was the price, and the blood required seemed, especially at first, to belong to other people, people who were already taking more than their share—“Look around you!” cried Hitler. “See how rich they are,” the very people who “betrayed you” at the end of the last war. It was “they” who had pushed the good Germans and Austrians into the untenable Treaty of Versailles, according to Hitler. “Behind our backs!” he shouted.

  But this time would be different, he promised. This time the good clean people would be vigilant, and do it themselves, their way. The pure old way, when the Norse ruled the land and the war god Wotan still stormed through their hills. And the girls in Vienna braided their hair and shook out their mothers’ dirndls, the boys took down their hunting horns and killed lambs in the woods, draped their decadent Beaux-Arts monuments in Hitler’s red and black, strengthened the coat of arms on their flag with his swastika, and joined their Austrian voices to his “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” which filled their streets, too, now, and seemed to swell to the very stars that spring.

  Hermann’s daughters sang along, too, at first. This new song wasn’t as beautiful as the Haydn it replaced; but it promised freedom and bread, and the young officers in the street, in their black and gray, were not, as Magda put it, “a bad sight either.” She and her sister weren’t immune to the calls for renewal; down with the old, in with the new! Young girls in springtime, they too were thrilled by the sound of the horns in the hills.

  But then, one morning in May, three German SS officers knocked on the door of Dr. Krugerheim’s pension and regretted to inform its residents that the establishment was as of that moment closed. They had come to escort the foreign students to the station. The girls had—the officers tapped their watches—half an hour to pack their bags, so as to catch the next train east.

  A few years later, and those same SS men
might have just taken the girls out and shot them, and saved the Fatherland some money. What with the cost of the transports, and striped pajamas, not to mention all that gas, the Zyklon B, for which IG Farben was paid 300,000 marks, over the years.

  But all that was just evolving, and in that May of 1938, the Reich was still feeling its oats. The Austrian sun was shining and the birds were singing Wagner. The officers were young, and they waved to Hermann’s daughters as they put them on the train.

  “Tell your countrymen in the Sudetenland,” they called, “that we send our regards to them, and that we’ll be there soon ourselves, to convey them in person.”

  Then a whistle, another wave, and the train was off. East, out of Austria, in and out of Hungary, and then back into Czechoslovakia, the girls’ republic, their democracy, their home.

  THERE WAS STILL TIME THEN for Hermann to leave, but only a little, as we know but he didn’t. Hermann’s daughters traveled the four hundred kilometers from Vienna east to their village, Trebišov, in May of 1938, with some misgivings, but no real fear. Their father met them at the train.

  “A bunch of thugs,” said Hermann. The Nazis were no longer comical, but still beneath contempt.

  The girls reported the comment about the Sudetenland.

  “Impossible!” snorted their father. “We are a sovereign country! The English and Americans will never allow it!”

  Which still made perfect sense at the time. The borders were still open, and Hermann probably still could have taken his affidavit to the US embassy in Prague and gotten a visa. And had it been November then, with his trees standing stark and the snows blowing in off the Carpathians, maybe he would have boarded a warm train or even taken a taxi. Prague was about one hundred and sixty kilometers farther than Vienna, but as long as you could still travel, it wasn’t so far. An easy trip, one he’d taken before. He could go anytime, he figured.

  Which was true, until one day it wasn’t; and by the time the fruit had set on his trees that year, it was already too late. The America that would “never allow it” had problems of its own. Henry Ford himself was publishing The Protocols of the Sages of Zion, a half-cracked czarist hate tract; Charles Lindbergh, still a hero, was traveling the country, speaking darkly of “their” ownership of “our motion pictures, our press, our radio, our government.” And forty million Americans were tuning in, three times a week, to hear Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest, on CBS Radio, ranting coast to coast about “New York capitalists,” who were also Communists, and you-know-what religion, and the true enemy to boot. It was they who were mongering war with Christian Germany, when the real Satan was atheist Russia, and in the meantime, Father Coughlin wasn’t so sure Hitler was wrong. At a rally in the Bronx in 1938, he gave the Nazi salute.