Memory Wall: Stories (24 page)

Moths flutter against Esther’s porch light. The entry hall feels damp and empty. Robert wipes his shoes; he walks through his grandmother’s kitchen for perhaps the thousandth time. But it feels desolate tonight; it feels as if something vital has been stripped out of it.

He packs a blouse, some pants, a pair of slippers. On the table beside her bed is a novel and sticking out of its pages is a sheet of paper the size of an index card. Robert tugs the card free.

On one side is a smudged pencil drawing: a house with weeds growing out of its gutters. Five stories, two gables. Around the foundation more weeds flow outward into a broken, overgrown street.

On the other side of the card are the names and birthdates of twelve girls. It looks old: The paper is yellow, the text gray.

Name,
reads the row across the top, then
Date of Birth, Date of Deportation,
and
Destination.
For each name, the dates of deportation and the destinations are the same.
29
July, 1942. Birkenau.

Robert reads each name, going from top to bottom.
Ellen Scheurenberg. Bela Cohn. Regina Goldschmidt. Hanelore Goldschmidt. Anita Weiss. Zita Dettmann. Inga Hoffman. Gerda Kopf. Else Dessau. Miriam Ingrid Bergen. Esther Gramm.

8.

In August of 1939, another Hirschfeld girl—Ella Lefkovits—is deported to Romania. She is seven years old. A week later
Mathilde Seidenfeld receives her own summons: She is being sent east with a distant uncle to a place called Theresienstadt. “They say it’s a spa town,” Mathilde murmurs. On her last unmarked sheets of paper Esther draws avenues lined with steaming pools, marble bathhouses, crystal globes glowing on top of brass poles. She writes
For Mathilde
across the bottom, tucks the drawings into Mathilde’s suitcase.

In nightmares Esther burns; she sees flames chew through the draperies of the dormitories; she hears the overweight druggist gulp wetly as he slumps over in his leatherette booth. No letters come from either Ella or Mathilde. By now three new, younger orphans have replaced the deported girls at Number 30 Papendam; two of them are infants. Everyone speaks quietly; up and down Papendam passersby glance toward the sky, as if being hunted from the air.

Germany bombs London; Esther turns thirteen. She swallows her doses of anticonvulsant; she cranks in laundry from the lines in the garden. She listens to the distant sounds of ship whistles and the ringing of the harbor cranes. She speaks to Miriam about faraway places: Katmandu, Bombay, Shanghai. Miriam seldom replies.

In September a newspaper notice demands that all Jewish-owned radio sets must be delivered to collection centers by the twenty-third. Two nights later the twelve Hirschfeld girls gather in the parlor with Frau Cohen, Dr. and Frau Rosenbaum, and Julius, the old custodian, to listen to one last broadcast on the Radiola V. State programming plays an opera from Berlin. The girls perch on the sofas and along the floor with their legs crossed beneath them. The house fills with a grand, staticky voice.

Frau Cohen mends stockings. Dr. Rosenbaum paces. Frau Rosenbaum sits with her back very straight and closes her eyes
for the entire performance. Every now and then she inhales deeply, as if the speaker were emitting some rare fragrance.

Afterward the girls remain seated as Julius unplugs the Radiola, loads it onto a dolly, and thumps it down the front steps. Where the radio once stood remains a rectangle of floorboards less faded than the rest.

9.

In the clinic in Cleveland Esther drifts through dizzy, medicated hours. The steroids will prevent edema, the neurologist says; the anticonvulsants will prevent more seizures.

Robert stands over her at what might be noon of her third day there with a sheet of watercolor paper and a fistful of pencils. All his life they have drawn together; as a boy he’d sit in her lap and they’d draw superheroes, spaceships, pirate galleons. He used to spend hours peering into the framed drawings Esther had hung around her house; he’d practically grown up in her lap reading children’s stories she had illustrated. Mice tramping upright through a torchlit tunnel. Princesses ferrying lanterns through a forest. Now Robert pivots his grandmother’s eating tray across her midsection; he props up her back with a pillow and fits the arms of her glasses over her ears.

It takes Esther a full ten seconds to coax her fingers into picking up a pencil. Robert watches patiently, standing beside her, his head tilted.

With great effort she brings the pencil to paper. In her mind she pictures a white house, eleven girls peering out of eleven windows. She traces a single line across the page. Time passes. She manages another line, then two more: a lopsided rectangle.

When she holds the paper up to the lenses of her glasses, it’s a welter of faint crisscrosses. Nothing resolves out of it.

“Grandmom?” asks Robert.

Esther looks at him through tears.

10.

The house cook disappears. Julius the custodian is sent to a labor camp. No letters come from either of them. By now Frau Cohen is spending several hours a day in ration queues, deportation request queues, and paperwork queues. The oldest girls prepare meals; the younger ones wash dishes. Esther draws steamships in the margins of old newspapers: four fat smokestacks, crowds at the railings, porters on the ramps. Any moment the summons will arrive; any moment they’ll be sent away, the horns will blow, the migration will begin.

In the fall of 1941, when Esther is fourteen years old, Dr. Rosenbaum misses an appointment with her for the first time. Frau Cohen sends Miriam and Esther to his clinic. The girls walk quickly, fingers interlaced; every few blocks Esther swallows back an upsurge of panic.

At his little ground floor clinic the doctor’s bronze nameplate has been pried off the wall. Through a side window the girls stand between hedges and watch a fumigator pump clouds of gas into what had been his examination room. The carpet has been rolled up; the cupboard doors are gone.

“They’ve emigrated,” decides Frau Cohen. “They are well-connected people and it was probably fairly easy for them. They waited as long as they could, and then they fled.” She looks Esther in the eye. “Stay busy,” she says. “You’ll be with us.”

Esther thinks: He would have told me. He would not have
left without telling me. She peers into her jar of phenobarbital. Inside is enough liquid to last maybe two weeks. Maybe, she thinks, the medicine was something Dr. Rosenbaum invented to prevent Frau Cohen from sending her to an asylum. Maybe it’s merely sugar and water.

Esther tries three different apothecaries. Two won’t let her enter. The last asks for her name, address, and identification papers. Esther scurries out of the shop. She rations herself to three drops a day. Then two. Then one.

Unexpectedly, her brain feels quicker, electrified; a night passes in which all she does is draw by candlelight: twenty-thousand cross-hatchings of pencil, dark cities full of rain, pale figures moving down snowy streets, only a few circles of white on the paper to represent streetlights. Draw the darkness, Esther thinks, and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another.

Hour by hour, day by day, her senses sharpen as her moods destabilize. She feels giddy, then anxious; she yells at Else Dessau for taking too long in the bathroom; she yells at Miriam for no reason she can articulate. At times the walls of the dormitory seem to be thinning out; lying in her cot in the middle of the night, Esther believes she can see through the floors above her into the night sky.

And one winter afternoon when the house seems particularly quiet, the toddlers napping, the older girls doing laundry in the garden, more than nine years since her first generalized seizure, Esther hears a steam engine roar to life in the distance. She stops in the hall at the top of the stairs and clenches her eyes.

“No,” she whispers.

It roars toward her. Hirschfeld House vanishes; Esther walks through a lightless city at nightfall. Between the buildings are
warrens and featureless alleys and stony burrows. Soot rains from the sky. Every doorway she passes is crammed with dirty, silent people. They sip gray broth or squat on their heels or study the lines of their hands. Crows flap from gutters. Leaves fly along the streets and die and rise into the air once more.

Esther wakes at the bottom of the stairs with a bone sticking out of her wrist.

11.

Esther has been at the clinic for six days when she asks Robert to take her home. He winces in the corner chair and folds himself over his knees. His shoes look huge to her; his feet seem to have grown another size in the past week. In the guts of the walls, hospital machinery makes its throbbing hum.

“I need to get out of here,” she says.

Robert drags his hands through his hair. His eyes water.

“The doctor says it’s best if you stay, Grandmom. Dad and Mom should be home in a week. Maybe two.”

Esther works her jaw open and closed. It is increasingly difficult for her to speak. Orderlies clatter past. Somewhere a toilet flushes. How much longer can they keep her here? How much longer can she listen to this monstrous, mechanical, pounding thrum?

She looks over at her grandson, sweet Robert hunched over his knees with his curly hair and Cleveland Browns shirt.

“I need to be outside,” she says. “I need to see the sky.”

By her eighth day in the clinic Robert is practically crying as soon as she starts in on him. An intense urgency sweeps over Esther at unexpected times; she feels as if she has left a burner on, or a child locked in a car, and everything possible must
be done to avoid catastrophe. Twice she is caught by nurses as she limps past their station in her gown in the night, barefoot, trailing an IV tube. At other times the hospital is hardly present; she cannot say how long she will be away, or where she is going.

Robert talks about the redheaded neurologist, how he seems like a good doctor. Robert’s parents, he says, have made a breakthrough in China and plan to return home with the twins in fifteen days. “Fifteen days isn’t long. And they take better care of you than I can. You have to wait till they release you.”

Esther tries to rouse herself into full consciousness. “These drugs make me feel dead. Can’t you open a window?”

“They don’t open, Grandmom. Remember?”

“They don’t grow up,” Esther says. “The toddlers stay toddlers. The teenagers stay teenagers.”

“What toddlers?”

“The girls.”

Robert paces beside her bed. His tennis shoes smell of cut grass and gasoline; he has been working two days a week for a landscaper. The light coming through the window is dark green. Out beyond a parking lot, taillights slug forward along an interstate.

“That’s in your head,” Robert says. He twirls his father’s car keys around his index finger. “The doctor says what you see is only real in your head.”

“Real in my head?” whispers Esther. “Isn’t everything that’s real only real in our heads?”

“He says without the medications you’ll have more seizures. You could die.”

Esther tries to sit up. “Robert,” she says. Out the window the clouds have darkened considerably. “Bobby. Look at me.” Her grandson turns. “Do I look like I have a lot of time left?”

Robert bites his lower lip.

“I need to go home.”

“You said that, Grandmom.”

“What if they’re not in my head? What if they’re real? Waiting for me?”

“Waiting for you to do what?”

Esther doesn’t answer.

Robert’s voice quivers. “You’re asking me to help you die.”

“I’m asking you to help me live.”

12.

The police condemn a Jewish nursing home four blocks away. Frau Cohen takes in twenty elderly people. The men cram into the parlor; the women divide themselves between the sewing room and the dormitories.

Two weeks later ten more elderly people appear at the front door. By mid-January, Number 30 Papendam brims with people, anxiety, and lice. Every Wednesday Frau Cohen boils pots of disinfectant. Displaced people are camped out in the cellar, in the custodian’s closet, in the classroom, and on the floor of the dining room—a typist, a former librarian, a retired professor, merchants and jewelers. Each walls off a few square feet of floor space with suitcases, some fractured polygon in which to lay out clothes or play cards or dream.

Esther wakes at night with her wrist throbbing beneath its makeshift splint. Coughs ricochet up through the walls; girls scratch themselves in their sleep. Weeks pass without a seizure, then three or four come in a cluster: exhausting episodes, preceded by a minute or two of giddiness during which the train roars toward her and everything seems to
speed up and glow, as if the walls of Hirschfeld House might incandesce.

Esther wakes to the aged faces of strangers peering down at her in equal parts concern and horror. As if they look down at something from another planet. Her handwriting goes berserk. When she walks up the stairs Miriam has to take her elbow. “You’re not walking straight, Esther. You keep veering to your left.” In the mirror she is a fragile, sickly creature with outsized eyes.

At meals everyone watches how much Frau Cohen spoons onto plates. Esther can feel the eyes of the men on her as she eats. In her mind she hears Regina’s voice:
They’re taking epileptics, too.

Esther and Miriam spend nights hand-in-hand. A floor below a man reads aloud in Hebrew about the children of Israel. His words seem to reverberate through the tall house.
Thy walking through this great wilderness these forty years the Lord thy God hath been with thee; thou hast lacked nothing…

Beyond the curtains snow taps against the windowglass. Crows blow above the leafless trees. A last few gas-burning trucks roll through the neighborhood flicking their wipers and the canals roil beneath the bridges, and from the station another train rolls steadily east, through the snow, flickering its faint lights.

13.