The Living and the Lost
Page 18
When she tried to nurse, Mimi pushed the breast away and howled. Her mother wept. She was afraid to carry the baby from one point to another for fear of dropping her. Baths were a nightmare of a small body slipping out of control, imagined drownings, and other mayhem.
“I try to help,” Mr. Zelinsky told David, “but what do I know about caring for a baby? To tell you the truth, I’m afraid of hurting her too.”
David had a list of German women who had been approved by the displaced persons’ camp, which paid them, to serve as nannies. He started to take the directory from his desk drawer, then a remembered image stopped him. Frau Kneff was sitting on the sofa in the parlor and Elke was curled against her as Frau Kneff read her a story. Twenty-four hours later, Frau Kneff had a job. Then came the unintended consequences.
Among Jewish displaced persons, and there were millions of wandering gentiles as well, marriage was a chance at happiness and babies were hope, but getting out of Germany was salvation. They didn’t have to hear Harry Sutton’s predictions of how similar the new Germany was going to be to the old to know that truth. America was, of course, the promised land. England was desirable. Cuba or Latin America would not be so bad. They were Jews. They knew how to survive anywhere. But they had to get out of Europe, the graveyard of the Jews, as Millie had described it to Anna, as the few Jews who’d survived called it. The Western democracies, like France and Holland, had shown their true colors during the war. No Jew in his right mind would agree to return to Poland. Rumors of resurgent anti-Semitism were already filtering back. Firsthand memories of it were still fresh. Like most displaced Polish Jews, the Zelinskys were determined not to return, though one United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency worker had suggested they might want to be near their parents’ graves. Mr. Zelinsky hadn’t bothered to answer that one. The day of the incident they had an appointment at the Colombian consulate. They didn’t usually go out together and leave Mimi alone with Frau Kneff, but today it couldn’t be helped. The Colombian consulate demanded the presence of both of them.
Frau Kneff had hoped to take Mimi to the park. She was looking forward to pretending, even for a few hours, that she was a mother again. She was not an ungenerous woman. She didn’t intend to show off to other lonely German women. She merely wanted to act out a fantasy for herself. She loved this new baby. How could you not love a baby? But she missed Elke. Elke had been hers. Until she wasn’t. But a low, gray cloud, spitting cold rain, hung over the city, as it had done for the past several days. All morning, Frau Kneff kept carrying Mimi to the window and peering out, looking for a break in the clouds. The day was still gloomy when she put the baby down for her afternoon nap. Then God smiled. That was the way Frau Kneff thought of it. By the time the first whimperings indicated that Mimi was awake, Berlin had changed seasons, as it often does in March and April. The sun had broken through. A breeze was herding the clouds away. The sky had been scrubbed clean. She lifted Mimi out of the crib, changed her diaper, dressed her in her best coat and leggings, and tucked her into the carriage under several blankets. The sky looked like spring, but the trees were bare and winter still snapped in the air.
She was sitting on a bench—imagine, a bench in a Berlin park again; say what you want about the Amis, they got things done—with Mimi on her lap, thinking about Elke. She was always thinking about Elke. It would be the most logical thing in the world. Elke had always loved babies. And now that Frau Kneff had another baby to look after, even if it wasn’t the same as looking after her own Elke, Anna wouldn’t mind. Frau Kneff knew how painful to Anna her visits had been. The fact that this baby, too, was Jewish made it even better. It proved Frau Kneff really did not have an ounce of prejudice.
She’d lost her wristwatch in a bombing long ago, but she could tell from the angle of the sun in the newly laundered sky and the lengthening shadows of the trees that it must be close to three. Riemeisterstrasse wasn’t far, perhaps a fifteen-minute walk. Elke would just be coming home from school. She lifted Mimi off her lap, tucked her into the carriage, and started out of the park.
The timing was, as she’d hoped, perfect. Anna was just putting the key in the lock of the outside door when Frau Kneff pushed the carriage onto Riemeisterstrasse. She called out. Anna turned, saw her, and stood waiting. Even at this distance, Frau Kneff could see the wary frown on her face. But Elke started running toward her, her skinny legs in their gray woolen stockings and brown oxfords flying over the still-muddy street, her braids streaming behind her, her breath getting shorter as she got closer to her other mama, her true mama, her mama who had brought her a present, for what else could she be pushing than a new doll in a new carriage? It was as big as life-size. Elke ran faster.
She reached Frau Kneff and bent to peer into the carriage. She reared back. This was no doll. This was a real baby. Her mama had given her away and gotten herself a new baby. She wanted to punch its little face. Instead, she turned and started walking fast back to her other mama, who wasn’t her real mama, though everyone said she was. Maybe she didn’t have any mama at all.
Between them Anna and Frau Kneff managed to get the carriage up the stairs to the flat.
“Like old times,” Frau Kneff said as they maneuvered it. “We used to do this with your carriage,” she said to Elke, but Elke had already clattered up the steps ahead of them.
Anna opened the door. Frau Kneff wheeled in the carriage, bent, and lifted Mimi out. “This is my new baby, Schatzi. Isn’t she cute? Just like you when you were little, only her curls are black, not red like yours. Do you want to hold my new baby?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Anna said, but she didn’t have to worry. Elke had already started down the hall away from them.
“Take Frau Kneff into the parlor,” Anna called after her.
Names had always been a dicey business among them. At first Elke had insisted on calling Frau Kneff Mama and refused to call Anna anything. Gradually Frau Kneff had become Aunt Teresa, but Anna still didn’t have a name. Now Anna decided it was time Frau Kneff became Frau Kneff.
Anna continued down the hall to the kitchen, put on the water for tea, poured a glass of milk for Elke, sliced a cake and arranged the pieces on a plate, and carried a tray with everything back to the parlor. Frau Kneff was sitting on the sofa with the baby on her lap. Elke was perched on the edge of a cushion, her eyes on the faded carpet, her mouth a thin line of rage. The baby was turning her big black eyes from Frau Kneff to Elke and back.
“Would you like to hold baby?” Frau Kneff asked Elke again as Anna put down the tray.
Elke didn’t answer.
Frau Kneff lifted Mimi’s chubby arms—when was the last time either woman had seen a chubby baby?—toward Elke. “See, she wants to go to you.”
“Why don’t you let her have her milk first?” Anna said. “And you have some tea.”
She took a cup and saucer, poured tea, put it on the table within reach of Frau Kneff, took a plate, put a slice of cake on it, and placed it beside the cup and saucer. Then she leaned toward Frau Kneff. “I’ll hold the baby while you eat.”
“Let Elke hold her,” Frau Kneff insisted and began lifting the baby out of her lap toward Elke. The baby waved her arms as if she were swimming through the air. As she got closer, she reached out, grabbed Elke’s braid, and tugged.
Elke screamed and sprang off the sofa. Mimi tumbled to the floor, hitting the table as she went. The cup followed.
Both women were on their feet in a flash. Frau Kneff scooped up Mimi. Anna bent over both of them. The baby was howling, and Frau Kneff was trying to quiet her while she examined the small body for burns and injuries, and Anna kept insisting that everything was all right and hoping that was true.
Finally the baby’s cries subsided into hiccups, and the women reassured each other that she wasn’t hurt.
“No thanks to you,” Frau Kneff said to Elke, who lingered, wide-eyed, in the doorway. “You’re a naughty girl, Schatzi. A naughty, naughty girl.”
Anna managed to get Frau Kneff out of the flat as quickly as possible, then went down the hall to the room she and Elke shared and opened the door quietly. Elke was lying across the big bed with her face buried in a pillow. Anna sat beside her and put her hand on her back. Despite all the food from the PX, it still felt dangerously fragile.
“You’re not a naughty girl, Elke. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t mean to hurt the baby. Frau Kneff never should have tried to make you hold her.”
Elke didn’t move. Anna thought of repeating the reassurance, then decided against it. Instead, she sat with her hand on her daughter’s back, waiting. Finally Elke turned her head so half her face was visible. One eye looked up at Anna.
“Are you going to get a new baby too?”
“What?”
“When you get tired of me, are you going to give me away and get a new baby too?”
“Never,” Anna said. “Never. Never. Never. You and I, Mama and Elke, are together forever.”
Even as she spoke the words, she had the feeling she was tempting fate, but they seemed to reassure Elke, a little.
Sixteen
Millie had been hearing about the film for weeks now. The first time was on an evening before the incident in Alexanderplatz when she and Theo had gone for dinner to Die Möwe. The Seagull, as it was known among the Americans and Brits, was a café on Neue Wilhelmstrasse in the Russian sector where Allied cultural and denazification officers and German artists and intelligentsia, many only recently returned from exile in Russia, gathered to argue art and politics, hunt for sex, and hope for love over cheap borscht and sausage, beer and vodka—especially vodka. No ice, no mixers, no frou-frou cherries or slices of citrus to turn the alcohol into a cocktail, merely tiny glasses of clear liquid guaranteed to defang the Berlin winter, blunt memories, and assuage the guilt of living almost well in the midst of so much misery. The German population of Berlin was starving, and the Russian occupiers weren’t eating much better, despite the fact that unlike the Americans and Brits, who imported supplies from home, the Russkies subsisted off the German land, with the exception of vodka and caviar, which they shipped from Mother Russia to fuel the obscenely elaborate receptions they threw to impress the other occupying forces. That night in Die Möwe everyone had been talking about the fact that the Russians had lost no time reactivating an old Nazi film studio near Potsdam. They were already shooting movies in the rubble. Somehow the ugly uninhabitable ruins took on a haunting dreamy aura on celluloid, those who had seen early rushes said. The movie all the talk was about that night, however, had been shot not in Berlin but in Auschwitz.
No one was looking forward to seeing the film, but they all agreed they had to. She and Theo had planned to go. Then he was confined to quarters, and she was on her own. She thought of asking the nurse from the 279th Station Hospital, then decided Mary Jo witnessed enough horror in the wards and didn’t need to bear any more witness in her off hours. Besides, she was probably busy. She’d fallen for a doctor at the hospital and was spending most of her time off with him. Millie asked David if he wanted to go to the film with her.
“How many ways can you find to torture yourself?” he answered. “At least tell me you’re not foolish enough to go wandering the Russian sector or any sector of the city alone at night.”
“I won’t go alone. If you’re not interested, I can tag along with Werner Kahn and his group.”
She managed to stay with Werner and two other officers on the U-Bahn and the short walk to the half-bombed-out building that was serving as a theater, but once inside she lost them in the crowd of Allied personnel jostling and jockeying for seats. The air was thick with the haze of smoke from Chesterfields and Players, Gauloises and Belomorkanal, and the babel of American and English, French and Russian officers waiting for the film to begin. A handful of women, most of them American or British, but a few Frauleins, or so they looked, sat among them. The French and the Russians had no rules against fraternization. It wasn’t only that they were more broad-minded but also that the issue was less of a problem for them. The French and Russian troops didn’t have as much to offer the Frauleins as the Americans or even the Brits. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help thinking the movie was a strange choice for a date with a Fraulein.
Most of the seats were already taken, but she managed to find one in the middle of a row toward the back. The lights were beginning to go down as she struggled toward it, stepping on shoes and boots, getting tangled in scarves and coats, apologizing.
The din of conversation died in fits and starts. A projector scraped noisily into action. The credits began to roll. They got as far as the name and logo of the studio and the title of the film before a loud snap jolted the room, followed by the flapping of torn film spinning on the reel.
An officer in a Russian uniform sprang out of his seat, ran shouting to the back of the theater, and disappeared through the door to the makeshift projection room. Waves of nervous laughter rolled across the room. She could swear it was the sound of relief. No one, including her, wanted to see this film. They were here out of obligation or guilt or hopeful disbelief. Surely the things they’d heard couldn’t be true.
The curses of the Russian officer were growing louder, and as the lights came up she saw him. She’d been too busy finding a seat and making her way to it to notice him before. Harry Sutton was sitting in the middle of the second row. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that. The only surprise was the girl sitting beside him. Her blond hair streamed over her shoulders, which were covered with a silk scarf that screamed PX. Perhaps the two of them weren’t together. The girl might be with the officer on her other side. Then Harry leaned over and said something in her ear. At least Millie thought he did. She couldn’t be sure because the lights were already going down.
This time the celluloid held through the credits and kept going. It was all Millie could do not to cover her eyes. Others were more squeamish. The American officer sitting in front of her was bent over with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Every now and then he sat up, watched for a moment or two, then resumed his hunched position. Off to the right someone groaned. As the film wound on, others echoed the sound. Most of the audience, however, sat silent and stiff as corpses.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the front rows. For a moment she thought a fight had broken out. Then she realized someone was struggling across the row of seats to get to the aisle. People were muttering, and someone was sobbing, and the figure broke free and stumbled up the aisle toward the door. Through the darkness, she made out the girl who’d been sitting beside Harry Sutton. She recognized her because the light from the screen where a tractor was shoveling a mountain of bones into a hole in the ground glinted off her silky blond hair. She turned from the girl to the front rows to see if Harry was going to follow her. He was still in his seat.
The film ground on. She had no idea for how long. Horror distorts time. Finally the lights came up. The entire audience seemed to be holding its breath. No one spoke. This was a world for which there were no words. Heads didn’t even turn. Who could look at another human being after witnessing the acts human beings were capable of?
Slowly, still silent, still not meeting one another’s eyes, they began to stand. The only sound was the shuffling of shoes and boots on the cement floor as they made their way out of the theater.
She moved with them, but alone. Danger brings individuals together. Neighbors pitching in to fight fires and floods, people singing in bomb shelters, strangers sending care packages halfway around the globe. Shame isolates. She stepped into the Berlin night as if it were the blackness of the human heart she’d just glimpsed.
Suddenly she was aware of someone walking beside her. She turned her head. Harry Sutton had fallen in step. Neither of them spoke. They made their way in silence, following the twin beam
s of their flashlights. The Russian sector was even darker than the American and British. Nonetheless, despite the murkiness, as they got closer to the U-Bahn entrance she made out two GIs standing in front of it with two Frauleins, talking and laughing and carrying on as if the world were a benign place. What was wrong with these men? You didn’t have to see the film to recognize the horror. You didn’t have to have a rule against fraternization to know that a year ago those girls were sitting in movie theaters with other soldiers, cheering at newsreels of your buddies being blown up and shot down and caged behind barbed wire. You didn’t have to be Jewish to rage and ache at the atrocities.
Determined to give them a wide berth, she took a step off the broken sidewalk, tripped on a piece of rubble, and stumbled forward. Harry grabbed her arm to steady her. As he did, the beam of her flashlight careened through the night and illuminated the group at the entrance to the U-Bahn. They were in the spotlight for only a moment, but that was all it took. One of the GIs was wearing David’s face.
* * *
At first David hadn’t seen her. He’d been blinded by the beam of light. But when she got control of the flashlight and began walking again, he recognized the silhouette immediately. He supposed there was a certain irony to that. Only after he’d been trained to identify the shapes of aircraft and other military equipment had he realized he’d been doing that with human beings all his life. The ability wasn’t unusual. The world distinguishes friend from foe and everyone between by bearing and gait and a myriad of physical quirks that are identifiable without ever seeing a face. Certainly, he’d have known Millie by the straightness of her spine and the lift of her chin—their mother had been a stickler for posture—and the way she walked with her feet slightly turned out like a ballet dancer. He would have known even if he hadn’t gotten a glimpse of her profile as she turned the corner.