Last Train to Paris (16 page)

 

Today, as I'm sitting in my glorious garden, with the scent of lavender gliding by, I can say that it was Leon who taught me about love. I've never forgotten what I learned. And I believe that's why I've never been able to banish him from my heart. Going through these notes brings out old feelings of longing for him. Am I still in love with Leon, or with the Leon that I created and who now lives in my imagination? There's no language for what I'm feeling at the moment. I'm stymied. I should pull some weeds.

 

After we returned to Berlin, things began to change for me. My political reporting was being lauded.
Agence France-Presse
and other newspapers were running my columns on a news service contract, and I was placing human-interest stories with the BBC. I finally felt that I had the credibility to write more-detailed and serious feature stories, even as they were becoming more risky to publish.

But I didn't show the stories to Leon. I didn't want to compromise him more than my mere presence already did.

My stories went deeper. They were despondent—profoundly sad. Rarely was there humor. Everyone felt displaced, either physically or emotionally.

‘The world as we have known it is gone,' Pete warned me over a drink at the press club. ‘You've got to be careful with these stories. No names. No identifiable buildings. Everyone must be anonymous. Barging into a café, a Jewish-owned store, a synagogue, is plain stupid. You've got to be more clever; otherwise, not only will you be punished, but those good people who are giving you interviews will too. Speak more quietly and carefully, R.B. Everyone's being watched.'

I learned to whisper.

But I felt an obligation to write meticulously the stories of the oppressed—feeling as if I were a truth-teller, a crusader for those deprived of their freedom. Soon, there were quiet warnings from the German government to the
Paris Courier
,
Agence France-Presse
, and the American Embassy about my reports. Ramsey and the higher-ups in the New York office were getting nervous.

“You're in the hot seat,” Ramsey cabled me. “Don't know how much more of this you can get away with.”

The hell with Ramsey. I was no longer concerned with what he thought about me.

 

I noticed a sinister difference in Berlin. Most Germans now assumed that it was their duty to inform the authorities of any suspicious behavior—within their families, by their neighbors. They listened for people on the street to say the wrong words. Anybody questioning the regime was taking a chance: embassy people, even foreign correspondents. And the
Abwehr
, undercover agents, infiltrated every part of the city. Everyone was spying on everyone else. It had become fashionable to disdain foreigners. Unless you were blond and blue-eyed, it was best to keep a low profile. This was impossible for me to do. My colleague Pete, echoing Leon, was forever warning me to be careful. Denunciation had become respectable.

 

It's too quiet outside. I've moved to my office and turned on the radio to the classical music station. I'm sitting at my desk in one of those newfangled office chairs that are supposed to be good for your back. The only problem is that I've lost so many inches in height that I've had to add a thick pillow under me so I can reach the desk and write comfortably. But my feet won't reach the floor—hence, a sawed-off piece of tree trunk is my footstool.

I need to stop sorting these papers for a while. I want a break from my past. I'll work on my column. I'll write something funny. I wish the pages that I write on could laugh with me—it would make me feel that I wasn't alone. I still write my rough drafts by hand. My handwriting has become squiggly. It's funny to look at, and even funnier to try to decipher. But now there's no one to laugh at my remarks. When I was younger, and still worked in the newsroom in the city, I would often look up and say, “Hey, listen to this.” Inevitably, someone would reply, “Yeah, R.B., tell us!” And I would. No more. No one wants an old person sitting beside him or her in an active office that is most likely staffed by young men and women. We remind them of having to watch their manners, their use of bad language. I really don't care about bad manners, or bad language, but I can sense the young people's discomfort with me. The reason they don't want to be around old people is that we remind them of death.

 

But all those years ago, I couldn't leave the human-interest stories alone. I continued to look at the perilous situation of the disenfranchised. This group grew daily—Romani, Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, Catholics, clergymen, nonconformists, communists. Even mixed-race children were considered enemies of the state. These children were the offspring of the black African colonial soldiers of the French army from the Great War who had married German women. There were also a number of black American musicians who, fed up with Jim Crow, had immigrated to Germany in the twenties. Many had married German citizens. Hitler called their children “Rhineland bastards.”

For the past few years, I had been friends with a man named Richard Moses, a black American jazz saxophonist. Richard had been born and raised in Harlem, but had moved in 1926 to Berlin where avant-garde music was popular. “I liked the mixture of cultures,” he told me. “Mulatto chorus girls from Cuba; Senegalese waiters, with their singsong French and mystifying Wolof; White Russians standing outside bars encouraging people with their funny German accents to come in and enjoy the earthly delights. It was a cool time.”

Berlin in the twenties offered him a freedom that he had never experienced in America. People took his music seriously. He ignored the Nazi threat. Then in the 1930 elections, Nazis were chosen by the people to represent them.

By then Richard had married a German woman, Daria Möhring, and lived in Charlottenburg at Savignyplatz. They had two children: Coleman Hawkins Moses, named after the great saxophone player, and Annelie Edith Moses, looking like a little bird when she was born–like Edith Piaf. There was always music in their house: practicing the sax, playing the piano, singing.

‘At first,' Richard once told me, ‘there were no racial epithets shouted toward the stage. Or perhaps it was because it took me such a long time to learn German that I didn't understand what was being said from the audience. Hey Rosie,' he said, ‘being naïve gave me my freedom–for a while. Then, as time went on, my German became more proficient and Hitler's ideas became more pervasive. The shouts from the audience became menacing, and I began to dread going to work.'

When Leon and I returned from our night by the sea, there was a message from Richard asking me to visit. “It's important,” he wrote. Saturday afternoon, I took the noisy, elevated S-Bahn to Richard's neighborhood. I walked for a few minutes before arriving at an enormous block of apartments that had been built in the nineteenth century for the middle class. On either side of the massive wooden carriage doors were two large chestnut trees, now barren of leaves, but still impressive. Inside was the courtyard, and I could swear that I still smelled horses. Going to my left, I entered the ground floor and saw the warning
VORSICHT! FRISCH GEBOHNERT. ATTENTION! FRESHLY POLISHED
. A lesson in fascist duplicity, I thought. This warning was in every apartment house in Berlin, even if the floors were filthy. I rode the creaking iron cage up to the fifth floor.

Richard opened the door. Since I had last visited the apartment, it had been reduced from four rooms to one. According to an official decree, the occupants had to make rooms available to Jews, who had been forced from their homes to make more comfortable housing for the Nazis' higher echelon. The Moseses' room was immaculate, but showed few signs of warmth. It had been stripped bare of its most comforting items; the blue-and-white ceramic coal stove was still there, but it was obviously not working. There was a gas two-burner stove, two chrome lamps casting a faint, ugly blue light around the room, and four unmatched wooden chairs. The piano was gone.

“It's cold in here,” I grumbled.

“No more coal,” Daria said, “except what I carry back from the embassy, which gets us through the evening. And, as you can feel, it's not enough.” I noticed that they were all wearing their coats.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was rude.” And they didn't bother to say I was forgiven.

Coleman was now ten, and his little sister Annelie was eight. When I visited in the past, they had been rambunctious and excited about absolutely everything. Now they sat quietly, politely, on their rolled-up mattresses, their little legs not even touching the ground. I sat next to Coleman and smiled at him. There was no response. Their mother hovered, speaking softly to the children, encouraging them to speak to me. Daria was a tiny woman with a pretty, simple face framed by bobbed blond hair. She taught German to the children of the American and British diplomatic services assigned to Berlin. It had been amusing to see Daria standing next to her husband–she was so short and he was so tall. But now, no one was smiling.

I kissed Richard and went to embrace Daria, but she stood aside and shook her head. “Please don't, Rose. If you do, I'll break in two.”

As was traditional, I had brought a bottle of schnapps for the adults and chocolate for the children. But this evening, no one seemed interested in eating or drinking. The adults sat on three mismatched chairs. “Where's the table?” I asked, and Richard pointed to the corner of the room, where pieces of the table were neatly stacked.

“We use it to get the coal started,” Richard said, shrugging his shoulders.

For the first time that I could remember, I felt strange in their home. The children were so quiet. Richard kept looking quizzically at Daria, and once I caught her shaking her head no.

I blurted, “Look here, you two. What's going on? Do you want me to leave?”

“No, of course not,” Richard said. “C'mon, let's go for a walk and have a drink.”

He and I left and silently walked down the street until we reached Savignyplatz. At the corner were two identical bronze statues of little boys facing each other, each pulling a reluctant goat.

“Coleman and I watched these two sculptures being installed in '31,” Richard said. “It was funny because he asked me why there were two. ‘I don't know,' I said, ‘what do you think?' ‘It's in case one little boy dies and his sad parents will have another.'”

“Something's happened, Richard,” I said, taking his arm. “What's going on?”

“We can't talk here,” he said. “It's too cold. Let's get a drink.”

We walked to Grolmannstrasse, where there were a number of bars. “This one stays open late,” Richard said, and we entered the dark, somewhat dank establishment, groping our way toward two chairs in the back.

We ordered two schnapps. “Tell me what's happening,” I said. “I don't understand.”

“A fascist group,” Richard said, “thought to study the supposed purity of the white race . . .”

“Oh, no, Richard—no,” I said.

“Oh, yes, my friend,” Richard said. “Oh, yes.”

“I've heard about this, but didn't believe such a thing could be true.” I was stunned.

“Yes, Rose, it's true.” In a flat tone of voice, Richard continued. “Their goal's to sterilize the Rhineland bastards. And they're succeeding. They've already rounded up hundreds of children of mixed race and forcibly performed surgery on them. I've heard that some of the children were kept there, as a scientist would keep a cage of rats. They were subjected to even more suffering through merciless medical experiments. Four months ago both our children were taken from us in the middle of the night. We had no idea the fuckers were coming.”

Richard began to cry. “They took them from their beds, still in their pajamas, keeping us away with guns and clubs. The kids were hysterical. We were hysterical. We both threw our coats over our bedclothes and ran downstairs to follow them. They were bundled into a black wagon and driven off, with the two of us chasing that fuckin' car down the street. Of course, it was no use. They turned a corner and were gone. We ran. It took us about twenty minutes, but it felt like hours, to get to the American Embassy, and we pounded on the door. No one would let us in—they must have thought we were lunatics, which we were at that moment. Finally, after I stopped screaming in German and switched to English, they opened the door. Some embassy people were awakened and quickly arrived to hear our story. The ambassador appeared. He began calling people in the German government. Not one of them admitted knowing where the children had been taken, or why. Then he made another call, to whom I don't know. We watched his face during each phone call. On this, the last one, he had a look of incredulousness. He said, ‘What? Say that again. I think I misheard you.' He hadn't misheard. Both our kids had been sterilized. It was too late. What you saw in the apartment were two formerly energetic and curious kids, now so traumatized that they barely function.”

“How . . . why?”

“I gather,” he said, “that it's been going on since last year. The program depends on snitches. In every building in Berlin, the regime has appointed a
Blockwart
to watch and amass information about the tenants' religion, the color of our skins, whether everyone's legally married or not. When this new edict was announced, our
Blockwart
didn't have to look far. He turned our kids in and is proud of it. The motherfucker! Rose,” Richard said, grabbing my hand, with tears welling in his eyes, “we have to get out of here. If we can get to France before war starts, maybe we can go back to the States. We've sold everything in the flat except for the bare necessities. We're hoarding money. We legally have to charge our boarders rent—who, by the way, are Jewish and are also being forced to pay off the
Blockwart
every month. And now, not only can't I get work, but there's none anywhere—especially for a colored man. Anyway, I have to stay with the kids while Daria teaches. They rarely go outside. They're scared of cars and strangers on the street. I read to them, do schoolwork with them, practice in front of them, sing to them. But they rarely respond. They hold each other's hands, afraid to let go. We've got to get them out of here and get them some help. They're zombies, Rose. I don't even know them anymore. Can you help us?”