Last Train to Paris (30 page)

 

I wonder if elderly people want to learn the truth? Or is the torment of self-discovery too heavy for an old person's back to bear? Do we bat it away with our gnarled fingers, not wanting perception, simply wanting peace of mind, the absence of anxiety?

 

* * *

 

The war was over and all the world could see the catastrophic debris. Even for me, a hardened journalist, what I was seeing was almost too excruciating for words. I think it will take generations of artists to distill and create the sounds, the odors, the emotional and physical sights that were discovered when the maze of barbed wire around Europe was hacked open.

I easily gained access to the camps and refugee centers. There were no words to describe what I saw. But I had to try. I understood that if I didn't put it down on paper, the horror would coagulate in my mind and heart. And it could drive me mad. It was at that moment that my style of writing changed yet again. My fury was crushing. My disgust with humanity threw me into a cesspool of confusion. I tried writing in my normal style, but nothing I put on paper could describe what I was seeing. Without being aware of what I was doing, I began to distill my words to a staccato rhythm. My editors complained that I wasn't fulfilling the necessary word count for my column. I told them, “Too bad.”

Of course, Leon was on my mind. But there was not to be an enchanted ending. I would not find him in a refugee camp. There would be no grand and romantic cinematic embrace. No, I would not hold his hand as he was recovering in a crisp and clean white hospital bed. I searched. I couldn't find him. I had to assume that he was dead. I returned to America.

 

In 1961, Berlin was divided. Each day, more and more of the wall was built around human beings penned in by the mighty, self-proclaimed judges—the judges who were supposed to make their lives better.

Years went by. The dream of Leon continued to live with me—not starkly, but like a rose-colored mist. After I returned to America, I commissioned an artist to paint Leon's portrait from my memory. The portrait's small, about twelve inches square. It's painted in sepia and Van Dyke brown with highlights of the same sepia, but muted. His wonderful face is hanging above my desk. I'm in the habit of wishing him
Guten Morgen
before I begin to work—and
Gute Nacht
before I go upstairs to bed.

 

* * *

 

When the Moses family moved back to the States, they settled in Harlem. It was obvious to both Daria and Richard that the children needed to be in a safe environment and around family. And Richard's family was pleased to welcome them all home.

Richard didn't have to join the army. He began playing saxophone for some of the big bands, and gigs in jazz joints. Daria went back to school and earned her teaching degree. Soon she was teaching in the public school system. Between the two of them they were managing to make a good living. The problem was Annelie. She rarely lifted herself out of depression. She wasn't aggressive, or unloving–but she couldn't find light in her life. She tried religion. She tried singing with a choir. Nothing worked. Her parents sent her to therapists, sent her to after-school drama programs, to violin lessons–and she tried. Indeed, she was brave.

But some essential part of Annelie's being was forever broken when the Nazis sliced away her femaleness. They rendered her neuter to make their lily-white men safe from temptation.

One early morning, a phone call came. It jangled me out of my sleep—it demolished my complacency. Annelie had flown out her tenth-floor bedroom window onto the earth of 128th Street.

The family was devastated, but not surprised. Like millions of people in the world of war, they had been struggling to heal their wounds.

I was always moved by how Daria had kept her family in a steady and warm embrace. After Annelie died, she labored to fill the empty space. She, with Richard's blessing, took in foster children. She became more involved in the neighborhood. Once, she complained to me, “I have a terrible singing voice. But if I could sing like Annelie, I would be in her gospel choir. Then I could hold her close to me for the length of the song.”

But she failed. Less then two years later, Daria was dead of uterine cancer.

 

I've always experienced a wild joy at brutal weather. I remember Nevada. The vast horizon—the churning, heavy-bellied clouds—my anticipation of a torrential rainstorm. It still gives me goose bumps. But the thunderous weather of death is different. If you're not careful, you could be swept away to nowhere.

 

Neither Richard nor Coleman could ever find enough peace to carry on their lives in the way that they had dreamed. They tried the best they could. They became an odd couple. Richard was a tall, although stooping, very dark brown man. Coleman was short, and as pink as his mother. They lived together in the same apartment in Harlem for many years. Coleman hasn't married yet, although I sense his time is coming. I think he's waiting to fall in love with a woman who is too old to have children.

Richard never remarried. Quietly, even peacefully, he died at the age of seventy-five.

“At least he didn't die tragically,” Coleman said to me. “That was his gift to me, I believe.”

 

In 1989, I returned to a liberated Berlin. It was to be my last assignment in Europe. I wanted to stay at the old Hotel Aldon and sit at the bar where Leon and I had sat. I wanted to see the room where the Press Ball was held each year, and where we journalists huddled together at the end, waiting to receive word that we were being expelled by the Reich. There was such an aura about the hotel; it had been a haven for international journalists, for foreign spies, for questionable and shady trade delegations. We correspondents always thought of it as the cloak-and-dagger heart of Berlin. It was three doors down from the Russian embassy and rubbing elbows with the British embassy. But, alas, the hotel was gone, destroyed by a fire in 1945. No one had told me about it, nor had I read anything. I was booked into the new Hotel Hansablick, also near the Brandenburg Gate.

 

A clever American journalist had researched and found that I had turned eighty-three on the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a result, a big brouhaha was being made about my prewar German stories. I now had the reputation of being both a good writer and colorfully cantankerous. Reporters interviewed me. I thought this hilarious.

The first interviewer was a woman reporter from the
Times
. “How does it feel to be so old?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I answered. “I think of myself as still young. I'm often surprised when I pass by a shop window and see an old gray-haired lady. I always wonder who ‘that woman' is!”

She smiled.

“What do you do with your spare time?” she asked, pencil poised above her pad.

She most likely thinks, I thought, that I lie around and watch television.

“Well,” I said, “when I've listened to the emptiness for too long, I take off my shoes, put on sad country western music, and dance around my kitchen table.”

That created a sensation among my peers. The headline on the reporter's story read: Jazzy R. B. Manon Dances the Blues.

 

As soon as I had arrived in Berlin I began to look for Leon. The East Berlin Jewish community was minuscule, and I decided to begin my search there. A young reporter, Jake Stein, from the
New York Courier
had accompanied me. Once we got settled, and our assignments booked, I sent him to the Rykerstrasse Synagogue. Since 1950, the synagogue had been the center of activity for the remnants of Berlin's religious and secular Jewish community. I asked him to try to find Leon.

I remember how my heart pounded, how I had to hang on to the table, when I read the note that Jake had slipped under my door:
Leon Wolff, metal engraver, is listed at Nürnbergestrasse 42, but has no phone number
.
Hope this helps, Jake.

He was alive!

Not able to bear the idea that I wouldn't see him, I sent a command by messenger.
Dear Leon, is it really you? Meet me this evening at 8:00 in the lounge of the Hotel Hansablick on Flotowstrasse. Please. Rosie.

 

I dressed carefully. Smoothed down my short, still-thick gray (I prefer to call it silver) hair, and put on mascara and lipstick. I didn't want to look too fancy, nor too newswomanly (meaning a tailored suit). Wearing a pair of black loose cotton trousers and a red-and-orange patterned Indian-cotton shirt that hid my skin-sagging arms and covered my wrinkled cleavage, I timed my entrance. At three minutes past nine I walked out of the elevator and turned right into the lounge. He wasn't there. And when I saw the old woman, I knew she was Leon's emissary.

She was dressed shabbily, in what some reporters called East Berlin chic. Wearing a nondescript black skirt and faded blue cotton blouse, she had on thick nylons and run-down, sensible shoes. Her white hair was pulled back in a chignon. Her face was very wrinkled—grooves of worry, of a hard life, I imagined. But she was beautiful, sitting straight as an arrow, hands elegantly folded on her lap. All I could think was that I should let my hair grow.

“How do you do,” she said. “Speak German?”

“Of course. Of course!” I said.

And she quietly told me, “I am Ruth Wolff. Leon's wife.”

 

Now, three years later, here I am sitting on my porch, remembering my confusion of shock and relief. Meeting Leon's wife wasn't what I had had in mind.

“Where's Leon? How is he? Tell me, please, tell me—”

“Be patient,” she said harshly. “This is hard for me.”

“Sorry.”

“We met,” she began, “in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, thirty-five kilometers north of Berlin.”

“Oh, my god,” I blurted. “I was so close to him when I was in Berlin!”

I could see Ruth flinch and told myself to be calm.

“Sorry,” I said.

“We both had worked for Gerard von Schmitt,” she continued, disregarding my outburst. “But we were in different buildings. So I never knew Leon until later. We were fortunate to be imprisoned where we were, considering the alternatives. When Leon healed from his concussion, Gerard had him sent to Sachsenhausen. And here he joined the lucky ones.” Ruth laughed—and she had a lovely laugh. It melodically moved around me as if a light wind. And then, like a door had been slammed, she changed course.

“I won't go into the horrific details of the camp. Since you are a journalist, I'm sure you're well informed. But we fell in love.”

“Oh, my dear,” I said, “I'm not sure I want to hear this. It's too painful.”

“No, no,” Ruth protested. “Listen!”

“I can't listen to this,” I said. “I thought he loved only me!” And then I was embarrassed by my confession.

Ruth looked at me as if I were pathetic. And then her face changed and she became sympathetic.

“I'm sorry, Miss Manon, please excuse me. I'm being insensitive. Meeting me must be startling. I'll leave,” she said, and she started to rise.

“No, please stay,” I said, putting out my hand. “I want to know. I
need
to know.” I could see her try to relax.

“At any given time,” she continued, “there were fifteen to eighteen forgers working in the shop. If someone made a mistake—didn't do a good enough job—tried to sneak food out for others—he or she was either eliminated or severely punished. Our lives depended on how well we worked. Otherwise, we were fed well enough—because we were considered essential to their ‘cause.' Leon helped us survive. He would remind us that we needed to enjoy the craft we were involved in. ‘Just think,' he would say, ‘how beautiful a typographic serif is on an italic letter inked with a quill pen. It doesn't hurt us to make a beautiful forgery. We can't blame ourselves for collaborating with the enemy. We are saving our lives, while praying that these beautiful, official papers will get lost, or be burned, or never used. Honoring this art will keep us in practice for when the nightmare ends.'”

“But Leon?” I said.

“Please, let me continue in my way,” Ruth insisted. “Leon and I would talk at the end of the day; only work-related talk was allowed in the shop. And of course, there was always a guard sitting by the door. Always with an Alsatian shepherd—and this frightened me since I'm afraid of dogs. Anyway, to continue—Leon told me about you. And I told Leon about my husband and children.”

“Oh, you had a family. What happened—”

“Please, Miss Manon, this is hard for me. Please, I must take my time.”

 

My memory of that evening is of the two of us sitting on dark-green upholstered chairs facing each other, a small table between us. I had a whiskey, Ruth a coffee. But I don't remember anything around us. Although I knew we were in a busy lounge, nobody else in the room was really there. I was fidgeting—she was calm. I smoked more than usual. She didn't smoke at all.

 

“All of us in the shop tried to help each other,” Ruth said. “I think what helped Leon and me the most was that we already knew what had happened to the people we loved. Many others in the shop had no idea, so they had to live with a different kind of anxiety. My husband was a teacher, and we had two small children, my little girls. No,” she said, “please don't say anything,” and she held up both hands to protect herself from my questions.

“We were all rounded up and shipped to Sachsenhausen in trucks. On the platform, I was quickly separated from them—as I was on the list as an etcher. They didn't survive the night.” Again she held up her hands. “And this is all I'm going to say about them. Please.

“After the war,” she continued, “through a resettlement agency, Leon and I were given an apartment.”

“He lived through the war!”

“Yes,” she said.