Memory Wall: Stories (26 page)

Esther turns fifteen. She feels, all the time, as if she has some important appointment looming, the details of which she can no longer remember. Often she fails to answer questions that are put to her. More than once Regina Goldschmidt, directly in front of Esther, asks Frau Cohen to take Esther to the hospital.

“We can’t keep her here any longer,” Regina says. “She’s getting worse.”

Frau Cohen’s once thick arms are visibly thinning; her hair sits across her skull limp and gray. She clears her throat. “Regina—”

“We can just tell a policeman,” Regina says. “Surely he’ll help us.”

“Surely he won’t!” cries Miriam. “I’ll watch her. Let me take care of her.”

Frau Cohen runs her palms down her apron; she sends the girls away.

Miriam and Esther move their cots to the attic. On July 26, four hundred and three English aircraft bomb Hamburg at midnight. Miriam and Esther watch from the attic windows. Spotlights spring up from points around the harbor. Hundreds of filaments of red light ascend from hidden gun emplacements. At their apexes the threads bloom into ganglia of red flak, white in their centers.

Esther presses herself to the floor. “We should get downstairs,” she whispers.

Miriam does not take her eyes from the window. “You can go.”

All through Number 30 Papendam people wake and listen to the sirens and the pounding of the antiaircraft guns; they troop silently to the cellar and huddle together in the darkness.

Esther stays with Miriam. Deliberately, almost lazily, the airplanes descend over the city. Bright streaks of tracer bullets come flashing up from the dark. The airplanes slip lower; they hold formation. At some signal bombs drizzle out of their bellies all at once: In a blink thousands of black spots are pouring through illuminated wedges of sky. The bombers scramble. The bombs fall diagonally.

Esther thinks: Swarms of locusts. Flocks of birds.

From their dormer windows the girls watch incendiaries fall through rooftops twenty blocks away and their casings open into light. White, phosphoric flames flow like water into gutters. Within seconds independent fires have linked up; soon entire houses are in flames. Above them clouds of smoke and
ash bloom in harlequin colors: red, green, orange. Whole quarters of sky flare, then are sucked back into darkness. It feels to Esther as if she is staring up into a vast, electric brain. And from the brain little flaming sheets of paper and pillows and books and shingles rain slowly down over the city.

She sees a golden pendulum swing through space. She hears a woman’s voice tell an old story:
And the light broke over the world and it broke into a thousand thousand pieces, and these pieces fell into all events and all creatures.

She wipes her eyes.

“Oh, oh, oh,” whispers Miriam.
“Schön, am schönsten.”
Beautiful, the most beautiful.

19.

In Ohio seizures flow through Esther. A steady electrochemical pulsing washes up out of her temporal lobe and overtakes the coordinated firing of her consciousness. Her arms stiffen, her head falls back. The seizures no longer seem to impair her consciousness so much as amplify it. Through her right eye she can see Robert turn her on her side and hold her hand; through her left she watches shadows eclipse the trees.

Maybe, she tells Robert, during her clearest moments, a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what’s happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration. Maybe that’s what Dr. Rosenbaum saw in her; maybe that’s what he was thinking as he stared into the white wardrobe that afternoon up in the attic of Number 30 Papendam: that there was something in her worth saving.

Robert nods uneasily. He brings her soup; he brings her
triangles of toast. He tells his parents Esther is doing better. He tells them she is as indestructible as ever.

In seizures Esther watches Miriam walk the girls in groups through the abandoned city to the tall building with the radio mast on its roof. The girls look up at the flashing beacon at the very top and then they climb the long flights to the twentieth floor. Their voices come to Esther in the bathroom, in bed, on the deck in full daylight. She sits very quietly; the leaves rustle; she hears the faintest scratch of a girl’s voice, riding along beneath the breeze. She hears a little girl say, “But it’s not even hooked up.”

“I’ll go,” a third voice says, suddenly amplified. “Papa worked in a furniture store. We lit candles on Fridays, kept the Sabbath. Even after I was sent to Hirschfeld House I thought everybody did the same. It wasn’t until I saw the signs and asked Frau Cohen what they meant that I knew we were Jewish.”

Or: “Okay. Right. I had an uncle in the United States. When I was thirteen—this was years after my parents were gone—Frau Cohen wrote him a letter asking if he could sponsor a trip. For me. Whether he could find me a place to live, feed me, all that. Get me out of Hamburg. I told her not to write that he’d have to feed me. I told her to tell him I could find my own food. My uncle wrote back right away.
Things are tight here,
he wrote.”

A long pause. Esther closes her eyes. She hears the voice say, “He didn’t know.”

Sometimes she sees the girls above her garden. They trudge up a long, switchbacked staircase, the youngest holding the hands of the oldest; they sit up on the twentieth floor in the big square room, a quarter mile above Esther’s yard, taking their turns at the microphone, some of them lying down with their hands laced behind their heads, listening to the harbor wind
streak through the broken windows, a hundred feet above the treetops.

Esther whispers their names into the darkness of the backyard. Ellen, Bela, Regina, Hanelore, Anita, Zita, Inga, Gerda, Else, Miriam. Robert is at her elbow. “Tell me about them,” he says.

“Anita Weiss had a lisp. She used to catch her tongue between her teeth. Zita could never keep the hair out of her eyes. Regina had a widow’s peak. The other girls said she was mean but I think she was always afraid. She didn’t trust that anything could be permanent.”

“Who was your best friend?”

“Miriam,” Esther murmurs. “I loved her. She was older than me. Just a few years younger than you are now.”

Robert hands her a mug of tea. A minute passes, or an hour. Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.

Robert’s parents call from China; they need a certain lawyer’s phone number; they need Robert to deliver something to his father’s office. They plan to be home by the fifth of July. They want to know if Robert needs them home sooner.

“It’s not awful,” says Robert. “Being with her. It’s sort of amazing, actually.” He is quiet awhile; his mother breathes on the other end. “But I don’t know how much longer I can do it.”

That afternoon he pulls a two-wheeled bike trailer made for children from the depths of his parents’ garage. He straps seat cushions inside, mounts it behind his bicycle; in the evening
he helps Esther into the trailer and pulls her down their long street.

They go slowly; he avoids traffic and hills. That night they ride for a full hour, through the dusk and into the moonlight, passing farms and occasional subdivisions, down the long, flat, rural roads of northeastern Ohio, maybe one car passing every ten minutes, and Esther feels as if she is being pedaled through a half-world of shimmering trees and fields and water towers and great flexing pools of shadow. In the distance, over Lake Erie, hazy thunderheads stack up in coral-colored towers. Robert pedals hard and with great seriousness, and Esther feels the blood pumping through her.

“Are you comfortable, Grandmom?” Robert asks, turning around, panting.

“More than you know,” Esther says.

20.

On July 28 the summons finally arrives for the Hirschfeld girls. The eagle and the cross on an envelope. No stamp. As if delivered from the office of God. Frau Cohen calls the girls from their various chores; they sit facing her while she unfolds her reading glasses.

Around them a thousand houses in Hamburg smolder. Around them prisoners of war load bodies onto wagons and sailors drowse over their guns. In the garden behind the orphanage a former bank manager rakes between rows of cabbages.

They are to travel on foot to a school gymnasium beside the Central Hotel. From there a deportation agent will escort them to the Ludwigslust railway station. There are long, meticulous
lists of what it is advisable to bring—nightdresses, mittens, candles, shoe polish, eyeglasses—and what is not advisable—rugs, plants, books, matches. There are directions for how everything should be labeled and conveyed; each girl is given a deportation number.

Where, where, where. Regina Goldschmidt finally gets the question out first. The girls lean closer to hear the reply; several clamp their hands over their hearts. Frau Cohen flips through the papers.

“Warsaw.”

Esther tries to catch her breath. She has the sense that if she lets herself blink, she will see another world rippling beneath this one. Warsaw—how many times has she imagined Nancy Schwartzenberger’s life there? She tries to remember Frau Rosenbaum’s picture postcards. Old town. Wilanów Palace. The Vistula River.

All afternoon the girls pack their things. Esther concentrates—candles, shoe polish, nightdress, arithmetic book. Underwear, birth certificate, thread. She thinks of Nancy Schwartzenberger sewing buttons. How old will Nancy be now? How exciting if they can manage to meet up with her!

Maybe, Esther decides, they will have more space in Warsaw. Maybe there will be apothecaries with white gloves and loaded shelves.

Auswanderung
. The paths of the birds.

At the other end of the attic nine-year-old Hanelore Goldschmidt besieges Miriam with questions: Will there be school? What about gymnastics? What kind of animals will they have? Will we be allowed to go to the zoo? Miriam goes downstairs, helps Hanelore choose among her few possessions. Before supper the girls carry their suitcases to the front door and leave them in a row with their tags bristling from the
handles, all of it to be brought in wheelbarrows to the station in the morning.

After prayers Esther and Miriam climb the staircase to the attic and push open the trapdoor. They lie down beside the big white wardrobe. The attic beams tick in the heat; spiders draw their webs between rafters.

“Warsaw can’t be worse than this,” Esther says.

Miriam says nothing.

“Don’t you think so?”

Miriam rolls onto her side. “The only thing I’ve learned so far, Esther,” she says, “is that things can always get worse.”

Beside her friend in the attic that night Esther slips into dreams and when she comes back into herself it is very late. Not a single light shines out the window. Someone is walking hunched through the furniture around her. The figure stoops in front of the girls’ cots for a long moment. Watery breathing. Cracking knees. Miriam sleeps.

“Dr. Rosenbaum?” He looks thinner than ever in the gloom of the attic.

“Very quiet,” he whispers.

“What’s happening?”

“Shhh.”

She thinks: He came to say goodbye. In the morning we’re leaving, so he came to say goodbye to me.

“Your dress,” he says. “The coat, too.”

She pulls on stockings, laces her shoes. Miriam does not stir. Esther follows Dr. Rosenbaum down five flights of stairs, past sleeping children and muttering crones and doomed men at last into the parlor, where he peers with all his attention through a gap in the curtains. Someone snores at the other end of the room. Someone else coughs.

Are they leaving so early? Why not wait until morning?
Every time she tries to ask him something, he hushes her. Out in the street the springs of a truck ring dully as its tires rattle across the cobbles. “The curfew—” Esther says, and Dr. Rosenbaum hisses, “Now,” and hurries her out of the house and through the gate. The truck’s headlights are not running and Papendam is very dark. The truck’s back swings open; inside is a void, a blankness out of which scared faces slowly bloom: The truckbed is stuffed with people.

“Hurry,” says Dr. Rosenbaum.

“But Miriam!” cries Esther. “My bag!”

“Go,” says Dr. Rosenbaum, and pushes her in.

21.

Eleven murdered girls wake up on the floor of a tall, unremarkable rowhouse. Esther wakes in her bed in Ohio, her grandson asleep down the hall on the couch. Frau Cohen wakes at Number 30 Papendam in 1942, washes her face, and pulls on her cleanest housedress. She laces her shoes, pauses on the threshold of the kitchen, and sends up her requests to God. Please watch over us as we begin our journey. Please don’t let me falter.

Within the wet enclosure of a single mind a person can fly from one decade to the next, one country to another, past to present, memory to imagination. Why Esther and not Miriam? Why not any of the others? Why did Dr. Rosenbaum choose her? Getting Esther out of Hamburg cost him everything: certainly all his money, perhaps his life. Was Esther the one good thing he could do, the one thing he could smuggle out?

She wakes in a cottage in the woods. The ceiling is low and the furniture is roughhewn. Old pickaxes and sawblades and
crampons are fixed haphazardly to the walls—the effect is of a rusting, historical suffocation. The cupboards are dens of superstition: filled with a putrescent reek, jars of dark elixirs, unlabeled pain remedies, molasses, crystals, something marked “belladonna,” something marked “trumpet of death.” Out the tiny windows hundreds of birch trunks gleam bone white against the dawn. A home to forest people involved in some dark, gnomish magic.

In front of the cottage Dr. Rosenbaum is asleep on a log bench without a blanket to cover him. She fears he is dead but when she says his name he opens his eyes.