Memory Wall: Stories (23 page)

“Only children from the same family,” Miriam says, “get sent together.”

The radio says,
The Führer’s relationship to children never ceases to move and amaze us
.
They approach him with complete trust, and he meets them with the same trust. He alone is to be thanked for the fact that for German children, a German life has once again become worth living.

On Esther’s ninth birthday Dr. Rosenbaum arrives with nine pencils wrapped in ribbon. “Growing up so tall,” he marvels. He replenishes Esther’s bottle of anticonvulsant; he asks
her a series of questions about her latest illustrations. He looks for a long time at a drawing in which a miniature city sprouts from the head of a pin: tiny rooftops covered with tinier tiles, tiny flags waving from infinitesimal spires.

“Extraordinary,” he declares.

At dinner all the girls sit as close as they can to Dr. Rosenbaum’s wife, a tiny woman with bright silver hair who smells of cashmere and perfume. She tells the girls about bridges over the Arno, apiaries in the Luxembourg Gardens, sailboats in the Aegean. After the meal the oldest girls serve cake on the Hirschfeld House tea set, and everyone gathers around Frau Rosenbaum in the parlor to examine her picture postcards: Stockholm, London, Miami. Spiderwebs of rain fall past the windows. Violin music whispers out of the big Radiola V. Frau Rosenbaum describes the November light in Venice, how it simultaneously hardens and softens everything.

“In the evenings that light is like liquid,” she sighs. “You want to drink it.”

Esther closes her eyes; she sees archways, canals, staircases coiling around mile-high towers. She sees a man and a woman crouched in front of a window, cross-hatchings of snow falling beyond the glass.

When she opens her eyes, a crow is sitting on a branch just outside the window. It turns an eye toward her, cocks its head, blinks. Esther walks toward it, sets her palm against a pane. Does she see it? Just there? Something glowing between its feathers? Some other world folded inside this one?

The crow flaps away. The branch bobs.

Frau Rosenbaum murmurs another story; the girls sigh and giggle. Esther looks out into the night and thinks: We wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died.

5.

Eighty-one-year-old Esther wakes at 6 a.m. and has to lean against the wall as she walks to the bathroom. Her whole house seems to sway back and forth, as though in the night someone has towed it four miles north and set it adrift upon the swells of Lake Erie.

The sun rises. She makes herself toast but has no appetite for it. Out in the garden a rabbit sits chewing, but Esther cannot muster the effort to scare it away. Just now her stomach feels as if it is pulsing, as if hornets are convening inside it.

A train roars to life in the distance. Esther kneels, then falls onto her side. She seizes.

In something like a dream, Esther watches Miriam Ingrid Bergen lead Hanelore Goldschmidt up the stairwell of a tall, narrow house.

Three flights, four flights. The rooms they pass have nothing in them. At the top of the stairwell Miriam pushes through a trapdoor into an attic. From twin hexagonal windows in the dormers they peer out.

Dangling fire escapes, truncated chimneys, rusted ducting. A narrow canal choked with trees. All the rooftops have weeds sprouting from between tiles; some have caved in entirely. No smoke. No trams, no lorries, no generators, no whanging hammers or clopping horses or shouting children. No surface clatter. No sheets of newsprint flying in the wind.

“Is this Hamburg?” whispers Hanelore.

Miriam doesn’t answer. She is looking at a distant building perhaps twenty stories tall: the tallest building she can see. From its roof a steel-lattice radio antenna anchored with guy wires rises still higher; at its very summit a single green beacon flashes.

A flock of small black birds wheels slowly around it.

“Where is everybody?” asks Hanelore.

“I don’t know,” says Miriam.

They return downstairs. The other girls sit against the walls wordless and afraid and a bit hungry. Sand in their eyes. The smaller ones nodding off again. Phrases flutter between them. “No matches?” “There’s no one?” “How can there be no one?” The wind, washing through the cracked windows, carries the smell of seawater. The big, empty house moans. The thistles creak.

Esther wakes up. She has another generalized seizure in her bathroom at noon. And a third in the kitchen around dusk. Each time she sees the girls she lived with as a child. They drink from a nearby canal; they collect crabapples and carry them back to the house in the pulled-up hems of their dresses. They go to sleep shivering on the floor in front of the cold hearth.

After dark Esther finds herself in her bed not entirely sure how she got there. There is a smell in the air like dust, like old paper, like nothing alive.

Leaves swish against the gutters of her house, a sound like lapping water. She cannot remember if she has eaten anything since breakfast. She knows she should call Robert but the energy to sit up and reach for the telephone will not come. Out her window, clouds blow past stars. On their huge undersides she imagines she can see the reflected wash of an antenna beacon as it flashes green, green, green.

6.

Autumn in Hamburg, 1937, and the house martins depart for the Sahara. The storks, Dr. Rosenbaum has told Esther, will
travel all the way to South Africa. While all through the country Jewish people are hurrying north, in the opposite direction, toward the ports.

Signs sprout outside the butcher’s, outside the theater, outside Schlösser’s restaurant, always painted in the same trim calligraphy.
Juden sind hier unerwünscht
. No walks for pleasure. No smiling. No eye contact. These rules are not written down but they might as well be.

Esther is ten when the first emigration letter arrives. “The elders have arranged for Nancy to be emigrated to Warsaw,” Frau Cohen announces. Several girls clap; others hold their hands over their mouths. Everyone looks at Nancy, who chews her bottom lip.

Out, away,
Auswanderung
. Warsaw: Esther imagines grand palaces, silver candlesticks, food carts rattling through ballrooms. She draws streetlamps reflected in a river and a four-wheeled carriage pulled by two white horses bedecked in bells. A trim driver with a tasseled whip rides on the box and inside a little girl in long gloves sits behind a veil of silk.

Two dawns later, fourteen-year-old Nancy Schwartzenberger stands in the hall clutching a cardboard suitcase nearly as big as she is. Inside she has crammed her Hebrew reader, several dresses, three pairs of stockings, two loaves of bread, and a china plate left to her by her deceased mother. Her carefully handwritten luggage tag is looped through the handle.

The remaining Hirschfeld girls crowd the top of the second story stairwell, still in their nightdresses, the older ones holding up the youngest so they can see. Down in the parlor Nancy is small in a white cardigan and navy blue dress. She looks as if she cannot make up her mind whether to laugh or to cry.

Frau Cohen walks her to the deportation center and comes back alone. A single letter comes from Nancy in October.
I’m
sowing buttons all day. The men I came with are lyeing pavement for motorrways. This work is hard. Its awful crowded. I’d die for a latke. Bles you all
.

Through the ensuing winter rumors swirl through Hirschfeld House like tendrils of some invisible gas. The girls hear that all stores owned by Jewish people will be ransacked; they hear the government is preparing a weapon called the Secret Signal, which turns the brains of every Jewish kid to paste. They hear policemen are slipping into Jewish houses at night and shitting on dining room tables while everyone is asleep.

Each girl becomes a carrier of her own individual measure of hope, fear, and superstition. Else Dessau says the Foreign Exchange Department is allowing steamships crammed with children called
Kindertransport
to travel to England. Before departing, they may go to any department store in the city and select three traveling outfits. Regina Goldschmidt says the police are taking all the handicapped people in Hamburg to a brick house behind the Hamburg-Eppendorf hospital and sitting them in special chairs that shoot their private parts with rays. Epileptics, too, she says, and looks straight at Esther.

Gold and silver are confiscated. Driver’s licenses are confiscated. Smoked herring disappears; butter and fruit become memories. Frau Cohen starts rationing paper and Esther has to resort to drawing on the edges of newspapers and in the margins of books. She draws an ogre closing a butterfly net over a platter-sized city; she draws a gargantuan crow crushing rowhouses in its beak.

Surely, Esther tells Miriam, they will be deported soon. Surely they will be welcomed elsewhere. Canada, Argentina, Uruguay. She imagines Nancy Schwartzenberger sitting down after a day’s work with a dozen others, steaming dishes passing
from one hand to the next. She draws the lights of chandeliers reflected in sparkling tableware.

In November of 1938 Esther and Miriam sit inside the neighborhood druggist’s in a leatherette booth with three squares of chocolate between them. It’s the first time Frau Cohen has allowed them out of Hirschfeld House in four days. Every customer who enters seems to know something new: The synagogues are going to be burned tomorrow; the Jewish Shipping Company will be aryanized; all the adult males in the neighborhood will be arrested.

An elderly man runs in and claims boys in jackboots and armbands are breaking windows in a shoe shop on Benderstrasse. The drugstore goes quiet. Within ten minutes the remaining customers have slipped out. Esther can feel a familiar, slow apprehension coiling itself around her throat.

“We should go,” she tells Miriam.

The overweight druggist sits down in a booth across from Esther and Miriam. His face looks as pale and hard as a pebble of quartz. Every now and then he emits an audible whimper.

“Who’s he talking to?” Miriam whispers.

Esther tugs at Miriam’s sleeve. The druggist stares into nothingness.

“I hear his family has already left,” Miriam whispers.

“I don’t feel well,” Esther says. She takes her bottle of anticonvulsant from her pocket and sets three drops onto the back of her tongue. Outside, a gang of boys pedals past, bunched over their bicycles, one trailing a long crimson flag.

The druggist’s telephone, mounted to the wall behind the counter, rings five, six times. The druggist’s attention flips from the telephone to the window.

“Why won’t he answer the telephone?” whispers Miriam.

“We should go,” whispers Esther.

“Something’s wrong with him.”

“Please, Miriam.”

The phone rings. The girls watch. And as they do the druggist takes a razor out of his pocket and cuts his own throat.

7.

Esther is riding with Robert in his father’s Nissan on the way to Foodtown when she hears a train explode to life off to her right. By reflex she glances out the passenger window across Route 20, where no cars are coming and no trains have run for decades—a pleasant midmorning light falls onto a weedy roadside lot—and her legs stiffen and the smell in the car suddenly turns sour and the streetlights appear to flare and then wink out.

Esther comes back to her senses inside the neurology center in Cleveland. A plastic EEG recording cap, studded with dozens of wired electrodes, is installed on her head. Robert sleeps in the corner chair with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and the strings drawn so tightly that only his nose and mouth are visible.

A nurse in a blue smock tells Esther she has had an absence that lasted almost three hours. “But you’re here now,” she says, and pats the back of Esther’s hand.

When he’s awake, Robert plays some sort of videogame on the screen of his phone, or watches quiz shows on the television mounted in the corner. Twice he has long, one-sided telephone conversations with his parents in China. She’s okay, Dad. She’s right here. They’re doing tests.

In the evening a redheaded neurologist sits beside Esther’s bed. Robert reads from questions he has written down in block
printing on the torn scraps of a grocery bag. The doctor offers even-tempered answers. The lesion inside Esther’s hippocampus, he says, is almost twice as large as the last time they scanned it. They don’t know why it’s growing but it’s surely responsible for the increased severity of her convulsions. They plan to adjust her medications, increase dosages, introduce neuroactive steroids. They will need to observe her for a week. Possibly longer.

Esther hears little of this. Everything feels watery and remote right now; the drugs make her feel as if she looks out at her room through flooded goggles. Time drifts. She listens to Robert’s electronic game as it emits its anesthetic beeps. Among the ceiling tiles she watches barefoot girls tear small, pink crabapples from trees; they eat quickly, ravenously; they move about pale and strange in their undergarments with the ladders of their ribs showing; they shamble along broken streets, the smallest of them tripping now and then because her shoes are too large; they are gradually subsumed by fog and an unwavering, internal thudding, whether of Esther’s heart or of some intramural hospital machinery, Esther cannot say.

Around midnight Robert leaves Esther and drives the Nissan fifty miles back to Geneva from Cleveland and sits in his parents’ big kitchen alone. His college friends are hundreds of miles away and he has not stayed in touch with high school friends from town. He probably should be reading history books, working on his thesis, editing interviews he has already recorded with his grandmother. Instead, he watches half a television movie about two kids who travel back in time and eats a bowl of canned soup. Out in the yard moonlight spills through the trees.

His mother calls from China to say that his grandmother will need things: toothbrush, cholesterol pills, underwear,
something to read. “Underwear?” repeats Robert and his mother, sitting on a folding chair in a government-run transition house in Changsha at 2 p.m., says, “Just do it, Robert.”