Exodus: A memoir (34 page)

I shook my head no.

“Those lobsters that we have here in Norway are lucky enough to live in calm waters, where they don’t have to fear many
predators. A few years ago an experiment was conducted in which a boatload of Scandinavian lobsters was transplanted into the sea outside Shanghai. Do you know what they have in the waters in Shanghai, Deborah?” Odd looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t believe I do. Please go on,” I said.

“Sharks. Lots and lots of sharks. Do you know what those scientists found when they went to check on those lobsters three years later?”

“What did they find?” I looked over at Aftur and Minden; they were smiling as if they’d heard this story before.

“Those little lobster brains had swelled to three times their original size!” Odd roared. “You see, Deborah? They had to become vigilant! This made them very smart. I believe that’s why the Jews are such an exceptional people. They are always living in foreign places, and have to ward off predators. They’ve got bigger brains!”

“I guess that’s a possibility,” I said, amused. But inside, I was wondering: Was smarter necessarily better? How had having giant new brains helped those poor little lobsters, wrenched from their peaceful life in the North Sea?

It did not get dark there in the summertime, even at night. Turid and the girls and I ventured out on the rocks at around ten o’clock in the evening, when they had their nightly swim in the freezing sea. They tried to get me to join them. I managed to get in up to my waist, but it was too cold for a real swim, in my opinion. Aftur found a purple sea star and put it on my leg. She pointed out the pulsing jellyfish that swam near the rocks, all of them poisonous, one a translucent purple color, the other bright pink. I had never seen one outside an aquarium before. When I withdrew from the water into the chilly night air, I could feel my skin
throbbing and stinging from the high salt content. I was promptly bitten by three
klegger
, or Norwegian horseflies, and my calves swelled and turned red.

We dressed and joined Odd in the Fire Room, where a blaze was already roaring in the hearth. Turid sat down on the floor directly in front of it. Odd was nursing a tumbler full of cognac in his easy chair. I curled up on a sofa next to Börk.

Odd seemed to want to talk about Jews again. When he was little, he said, the only people who ever noticed his talent were Jews. A Jewish woman in his town gave him art books and encouraged his drawing. He longed to be around Jews today, but there weren’t many who crossed his path anymore, at least not in Norway.

“Aftur told me you were born on the border, during the war, while your mother was trying to escape, is that right?”

“Yes. And then when I was fifty, I found out my father wasn’t my real father after all.”

I hadn’t heard about this before.

“My mother wouldn’t tell me who my real father was. She has refused, no matter how many times I’ve asked her. For this reason I hate her. I have tried to find out myself, to do research. Right away I realized that if she was so ashamed, and kept it a secret for so long, that it must have been a Nazi. There were many Nazis in Norway at that time, and they fathered quite a few children, and after the war those children suffered like hell in Norway.”

“Who do you think your father is?”

“Himmler.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being serious. I made a shocked face.

“Look, I’ll show you something.” He played a clip from the movie
Downfall
on his little tablet computer. It was a scene where Hitler
had gathered all his nearest and dearest and said good-bye to them as they prepared to leave Berlin for safer territory. As Hitler left the room after parting with Himmler, just as the scene was about to end, one could see the twitch of Himmler’s head meeting his shoulder, the same Tourette’s tic shared by Odd and his son Ode.

“We have exactly the same tic. Himmler and my mother were in the same place right around the time I was conceived. I have often pondered this. But she will not even have this discussion with me.”

“My God, to even wonder such a thing. I cannot imagine it.”

“Apparently Himmler fathered many children,” Odd said.

During the day I watched Odd paint in the enormous barnlike structure he had designed for that purpose, the sloping ceiling fading into dim light, the sun pouring weakly in from the open door. He was working on several large canvases at the time—all of them scenes of desolation or barrenness in some way; a family clinging to each other in an arctic wasteland, a community in postapocalyptic mourning for lost land and home. In one painting, parents stood in the ocean while their child stared straight at the viewer; it was the face of Minden, Odd’s daughter. Even in the scenes of intimacy, the eyes told stories of enormous bereavement and violation.

As Odd touched a brush to a cheek or an eye, adding imperceptible glimmers of light that made bones seem to pop under their skin, Börk and Ode stood around with various apparatuses designed to direct light one way or another; students painted on small easels in the corners; Aftur and Minden watched from the sidelines. All was quiet and focused. When Odd sat down to drink
a glass of water and rest for a moment, he turned to where I was sitting, reading one of his books, and said, “I live under a black cloud, Deborah.”

“What do you mean?”

“My whole life I have lived under it and fought against it, and it is always trying to overtake me.”

“You mean the one we all struggle against to create something.”

“It’s a terrible thing to labor under.”

I could see from the expression on his face that despite the life he had created, and the family that rallied around him like ramparts, he truly did live in the prison of that black cloud, just like every artistic creature I’d ever met. Even though he’d established all the things he thought he needed for security and happiness, his internal alienation could never be rectified. Just like I was beginning to discover, a home did not guarantee peace or security, success did not mean self-validation, and most important, other people thinking they knew who you were did not give you an identity.

This is how it is for us, and how it will always be for us, Odd, Richard, myself—though we have been recognized by the public, we now know just how deep the chasm is that lies between ourselves and the personas of us that are out in the world. Certainly we will never be finished with the struggle to know ourselves.

Odd came to say good-bye to me the morning I left for the airport. He seemed sad.

“I do so love the company of Jews, Deborah,” he said. “If only more of them came through here.” He hugged me and kissed my cheek, and I wished I could find the words to tell him how
comforting it had been to see his world from the inside, that learning of his alienation had made my own seem somehow less lonely. But as I looked at his face, I could see that he already knew; it was as if we spoke a secret language.

I didn’t know how many more opportunities I’d get to see him; it seemed I was always drawing inspiration from the old, who were bound to leave this world sooner than I would have liked, leaving me to fend for myself when I might not be ready yet.

At the airport, I called Markus. We had not spoken in a while. I had been distracted.

“I was wondering if you’d call,” he said. “I thought that with our not being together, maybe you felt your passions ease up a bit.”

“Is that the case with you?”

“If anything, my passions have increased.”

“Then why assume that it’s different for me?”

“I guess we are always afraid.”

“Do you remember that part in
Pride and Prejudice
where Darcy tells Elizabeth he loves her against his better judgment, despite the inferiority of her connections, and she’s so insulted?”

“Mmmm,” he said.

“I guess I love you against my better judgment. Against the part of me that says you live too far away and you’re descended from Nazis, against it’s too damn hard to make this work. I can’t believe I let this happen.”

“I guess you could say that I love you too, against the odds, I believe I do, yes,” he said, as if he was checking internally to make sure.

I felt my stomach sinking. “What are we going to do? This can’t possibly work out.”

“I’m coming to visit you in September,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

“Okay,” I whispered. “I have to get on the plane now.”

“Call me when you get home.”

“I will.”

I settled into my seat and peered out the window, remembering a time a few years back when I left New Orleans, feeling in every bone of my body the pain of separation from Conor. But there was no pain now. I was older, and loss and endings in my life no longer felt like the end of me. Whether or not this worked didn’t have such high stakes for me anymore. I had stopped being a survivor who couldn’t handle disappointment and had started being a person like any other, secure enough in myself and my life to deal with the buffeting of external forces.

reincarnation

Isaac and I flew to California on my twenty-seventh birthday to visit Justine, with whom I had stayed three years earlier on my first trip to the West Coast before driving cross-country. I spent the day scared and anxious. Twenty-seven! Why was that such a big number for me? It had been five years since I’d left, since the first birthday when I had started the ritual of measuring my progress. I had acknowledged that the transition years would be difficult. I had allowed myself a few miserable years; I had not been naïve about what to expect. And I found myself at my birthday each year thereafter assessing how far I’d come, internally and externally, from the last. And as my external world had shaped itself so exquisitely from year to year, I lamented at my slow-to-catch-up internal self, which still felt displaced and depersonalized.

I was twenty-seven. I had built the life I thought would bring me security and peace of mind. When I had stayed with Justine in
her beautiful home in Moss Beach a few years ago and looked at her life, I’d thought, This is what I need! A home. And I had built it. Yet if there was something I had to face about this birthday in order to move on, it was this: There was nothing I could point to, externally, that would ever bring this transition period to a close and propel me into the future, which I had sacrificed everything to achieve. What had to happen on this birthday was an end to the ritual of measuring, of being hard on myself, of giving myself a time frame in which to achieve the impossible. I was right then, when I thought I needed to build a home, but I found the wrong place to build it: outside myself.

I knew then that I would not be charting my path anymore. It wasn’t a race or a contest. I would need to learn to be okay with a little uncertainty in my life, a few blurry edges around my personality.

We drove down into the wilderness of the peninsula en route to Santa Cruz to take Isaac to the beach. On the way there we stopped on a cliff to take a closer look at a slender strip of fog that remained out on the ocean, the rest having burned away. It was bent at one end, like a refracted beam of light; it was reflected in the water as a silvery slash amid the brilliant blue. Two enormous red-tailed hawks cried out above us, and I looked up to see them flying in a circle around a nearly full moon. “You’re almost finished,” they seemed to say to me. “Just hang on a little while longer.”

My phone rang. It was Isaac’s dad.

“Yes?”

“Are you okay? Is Isaac okay?”

“Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

“Someone started a rumor that you committed suicide. I freaked out.”

“That’s ridiculous. No, we’re fine. We’re on our way to the beach.”

It wasn’t until I ended the call that I noticed all the messages on my phone. I checked in on social media and saw that indeed the rumor was thriving. On Facebook, my friends were tagging me in posts that read “Homicide or suicide?” or “Is it really that hard to leave?”

I tweeted a photo of Isaac and myself. “We’re having fun at the beach.”

As I put my phone away and took a last look at the splendid, glittering ocean, I reflected on the irony. Why would anyone believe I could be at the moment of despair now, when I had put those dreadful years of wandering behind me, when I finally knew who I was in my very bones, and my life had just started to feel real? I had left, and it had been worth it, and I had come to cherish my freedom to build a sense of self that was authentic. I was no longer a ghost, threatened with obliteration.

In September, Markus and his mother came to visit. Isaac had already started second grade, and the leaves had begun to curl by the time they arrived. The weather was glorious, with brilliant blue skies that showcased clean, clear sunsets, like a ball dropping on New Year’s Eve. We rowed across the deserted lake in the evening,
the summer crowds having returned to the city after Labor Day, and crunched leaves underfoot as we explored picturesque New England towns.

I drove them into Manhattan one day, just to show Markus’s mother the city. It was her first visit to the United States, and her first time traveling without her husband. She seemed tremulous throughout, trying to recapture the joy she had always felt while traveling, but which is never the same without your traveling companion.

We walked through Central Park, tasted gelato in the shadow of the Flatiron Building, and narrowly avoided a collision with a truck driver in the East Village. We drove over the Williamsburg Bridge and I offered to drive them through my old community. It was Sukkos, so the streets would be dead, but the Hasids would be out in full regalia. I pointed out the little wooden huts in people’s front yards, porches, and fire escapes; the holiday was based on the ancient biblical celebration of the harvest, when people slept outside in makeshift huts to watch their crops.

Ada gazed out the window, transfixed. I drove past the double brownstone I had grown up in. It looked silent and implacable, its window blinds tightly drawn, its heavy metal doors indifferent. In the next house, an old woman sat under the shade of her doorway and stared at me as I drove by. I bent my head to avoid being recognized. At the red light, we paused, and across the street a family of Hasidic Jews crowded on the corner, young girls cooing at their nieces and nephews in strollers, a young couple standing shyly, removed from each other by the mandatory four feet.

“It’s impossible for me to imagine you here,” Markus said. “I look at you, and I look at them, and I just can’t make the connection.”

I thought,
I can’t either at this point. It doesn’t feel like my past, not when I look at it up close. My life is too different now to accommodate that story. But if this isn’t my past, then what is?

I drove down Kent Avenue and we parked at the waterfront. We walked down toward the little beach, from which you could see the entire Manhattan skyline. A Hasidic man had wandered over, no doubt trying to find a temporary escape, and he sat on a log with his black hat and coat neatly folded alongside him. He looked away as we approached.

“Careful,” I told Markus. “Don’t forget that they can understand German.”

“Right,” he said. “The last thing we would want is for them to figure out you’re a former Jew dating a Nazi.”

“Actually I was thinking more in terms of your own safety—they just don’t like Germans, period.”

We posed for a picture then, against the spendid, glittering backdrop. Ada held the bulky camera awkwardly, trying to figure out how to use it, and I froze my smile in patient expectation. But as the flash finally went off, Markus leaned in suddenly to kiss me on the mouth. Later, over a seafood dinner in an outdoor beer garden, I looked at the photo on the camera’s small screen and thought it odd that the surprise and unease I had felt in that moment weren’t at all apparent in the image.

At night we rolled toward the center of the bed, latching on to each other as if to avoid falling. He, who had never been able to sleep in the same bed with someone, and I, who had lain awake on those nights I spent with Conor, the weight of his arm heavy on my chest.

It’s crazy how well we fit together, he whispered. Indeed I felt like an oddly shaped key that had finally found the right lock.

I took them to the local farmers’ market on Saturday.

“How can this be?” he said as we drove past the exquisite views I had already become accustomed to. “It’s exactly like the postcards! They don’t even have to Photoshop the images.”

His mother was positively gleeful when we arrived at the market. A bluegrass band strummed in the gazebo, and shoppers milled about in the autumn sunshine. “Just like in the movies,” she whispered, enthralled.

We ran into various people I knew around town, and so I introduced them. There were my friends Dan and Debbie, Jewish lawyers from New York City, and Anita and Harvey, more Jewish lawyers from New York City. When we returned to the car, loaded up with fresh tomatoes and cheese and jam, Ada’s face had suddenly gone white, and she appeared tired and withdrawn.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her in German, but I couldn’t quite make out her mumbled reply. I nudged Markus. “Ask her what’s going on,” I whispered.

He turned to his mother. They had a rapid exchange in German.

“Ah, she’s never met any Jews in real life before,” he said to me. “She’s feeling a bit overwhelmed—actually she feels guilty.” His tone was, as usual, neutral, almost amused.

“Guilty? Why would she feel guilty?” I asked, incredulous.

“Because of what her father did. It’s her first time encountering the actual people who were persecuted by him. I think it just hit her.”

“But I’m Jewish! She wasn’t traumatized when she met me.”

“True. But I think she’s just starting to process what it means, you know. She never dealt with it before because it didn’t come up.”

Later, in my living room, I could see her try to recoup. She told us about her memories of her father, about how he had beaten her older brother when he came home talking of a Holocaust film his teacher had shown him. Ada’s father had then visited the teacher in his home and threatened him with violence if he ever showed such filth in his classroom.

“I was so young I didn’t really understand what was going on,” she said. “But my brother did. Yet we never talked about it as adults. I’m sure he knew much more about our parents than I ever did.”