Memory Wall: Stories (27 page)

“What happened?”

“You seized. We brought you here.”

“I don’t remember.”

Birds flit here and there, crying thinly. The sky is colorless.

“I should be with
them,
” Esther whispers.

“You’re tired,” Dr. Rosenbaum says. “This has been an ordeal.” As if this were it, as if now it were over. Esther hears herself whisper to Miriam, years before, in the darkness of the dormitory:
I hope we are sent together.

Dr. Rosenbaum smiles at her. “It’s best to stay inside.” She spends the day washing in and out of nightmares. Dr. Rosenbaum boils a pot of turnips; he sits with her and holds her hand. In the evening he hands her a letter handwritten in English, a sheaf of British pounds, and an address in London.

“When the truck comes back,” he says, “I’ll return to Hamburg.”

Esther’s vision swims with fear. “No. Please. Miriam. And the others.”

Dr. Rosenbaum squeezes her hand between his two big, cold palms. “Where they are going, you do not want to go.”

Esther tries to compose a sensible protest.

“Go live your life, Esther.” An hour later he’s gone. She is picked up that night by a man with six other children riding in a trailer beneath a sheet of canvas; they ride together through the dawn. A boy whispers that they have entered Denmark; another argues they are going to Belgium. One of them has wet himself and soon their rocking, lightless compartment reeks of urine. At midmorning the man hides them in a windowless, dirt-floored, seven-by-seven cellar.

They spend the next thirty-six hours there, a girl’s hip pressed into Esther’s shoulder, a young boy sniffling against her other side, the yelps of faraway dogs and the long silences of nightfall and the rumbles of airplanes passing far above. Rumors ripple between the children: They are being sent to Ireland, or England, or South America; a boy repeats, “We are going somewhere better,” over and over, as if saying it will make it so. Twice someone unlocks the door and pitches in a loaf of hard, dark bread and locks the door again.

In that place Esther’s face is crammed up against a board and in the board is a large, dark knot. All through the daylight hours she stares into that knot and sweats into her nicest dress until there is no longer any water in her to sweat out. Over and over the words pass through Esther’s mind:
I should be with them.
She watches the Hirschfeld girls climb the stairs of a glowing palace in Warsaw. The doors open; the girls step into a white foyer. They stare up into the thousand glittering diamonds of a chandelier. Someone in uniform comes down a long staircase to greet them. The doors slowly close. The light fades.

The cellar smells of sweat, hunger, terror, and human waste. The others know no more and no less. Whenever there is enough light Esther stares into the knot of wood until its grains squirm with miniscule figures, carriages and trams, streetlamps
and little coachmen dressed in velvet carrying whips, weathered houses and naked trees, and the more she stares into it she realizes it contains a dark city, alive, microscopic, teeming with people and rain and grime.

Twice Esther has grand mal seizures down there in the darkness. Her legs rattle against the slatted walls as the others try to hold her still, someone’s hand clamped over her mouth, someone else holding her on her side. She sees Miriam Ingrid Bergen riding a train, peering out a window, one of the younger girls in her lap. She sees a family waiting out in the darkness.

After the second day the children are smuggled to London onboard a fishing boat with guns newly welded to its bow. In Anglia, Esther shows a longshoreman her money and the letter from Dr. Rosenbaum. She is taken to a clinic where a man in a doctor’s coat gives her a set of secondhand clothes, a bottle of phenobarbital, and emigration papers for the United States.

22.

Inga Hoffman says, “There was a Jewish shoe store on Benderstrasse. The night they were breaking all the windows we watched a boy smash through the door and crawl inside. His father waited outside and when the boy came out with four pairs of shoes he looked down at the boy and scolded him. I thought he was scolding him for stealing but he was scolding him because one of the pairs he had taken had two right shoes. He sent the boy back in to correct the problem.” She tries a laugh but it comes across closer to a gasp.

Little Zita Dettmann says, “Not everyone was mean to us.
Two ladies left a crate of pastries on the front steps. Do you remember that? I put one in my mouth right away. Inside was strawberry jam. Strawberry jam!”

An even smaller voice sings,
One little goat, one little goat, which my father bought for two zuzim
…

Gerda Kopf says, “You hear stuff like your whole life passes in front of your eyes. But it’s not true. A life is really big, it contains a billion things, as many needles as there are on a pine tree. There’s no music, but there is a sound, like a far-off screech. Or smoke rising. Or like a woman inhaling a little, like she’s about to sing.”

A pause. A shuffling. Esther sits in the backyard and rain thrums on the umbrella Robert has braced over her. A sweetness rises in the air, rich, intertwining—hollyhock, rain on grass. Esther hears Regina Goldschmidt’s voice wash through the trees. “The lady at the end of the block had no home. Everyone called her Mrs. Glasses. She slept on the sidewalk for years. The other girls would say: Why doesn’t she just leave? I knew why. Mrs. Glasses had nobody. She had given up. I brought her a hairbrush because her hair was disgusting. And then I got to thinking she was cold and so I gave her my red scarf, too. My brown one was nicer anyway. Then I brought her the afghan with the colored circles on it from the cupboard in Frau Cohen’s room. I set it down beside Mrs. Glasses while she was sleeping. Her hands were scaly, I remember, and I was glad she didn’t wake up. Two days later the police took her away for stealing and I didn’t say anything. I never saw Mrs. Glasses again. None of us did. That’s my memory. That’s what I remember.”

The rain slows. The leaves drip. The garden steams.

23.

The Jewish Rescue Authority places Esther with a childless couple in New Jersey coincidentally named the Rosenbaums. They are first-generation Romanian immigrants and they live on a two-bedroom houseboat. At the tiny table in what the Rosenbaums call their galley they feed Esther meals that seem obscenely large: slabs of eggplant, hunks of chicken, steaming bowls of green bean soup. Three times a day the three of them sit down to eat at that table, in that floating house that smells of bilgewater and foot cream and baklava.

Esther writes Miriam every day. Mr. Rosenbaum bundles the letters in groups of six and mails them from the post office in Toms River. Where they go, who they reach, what hands dispose of them, Esther will never know.

Stories of the camps trickle into the newspapers; they are all Mrs. Rosenbaum can talk about. Why? is the question Esther continually asks herself. Why did Dr. Rosenbaum save her, why was she pulled out, why not Hanelore, Regina, Else? Why not Miriam?

She swallows a steady stream of anticonvulsants. She sells tickets at the movie theater. She tries to believe that the world can be a reasonable place. But most days the silence of her cramped, chilly room on the Rosenbaums’ boat overwhelms her: lit an eerie blue from a pier light outside, no voices of children, no music, only distant foghorns and ropes chiming mournfully against masts, everything rocking back and forth.

Memory becomes her enemy. Esther works on maintaining her attention only in the present; there is always the now—an endlessly adjusting smell of the wind, the shining of the stars, the deep five-call chirrup chirrup of the cicadas in the park. There is the now that is today falling into the now that
is tonight: dusk on the rim of the Atlantic, the flicker of the movie screen, a submergence of memory, a tanker cleaving imperceptibly across the horizon.

It is never warm enough. She buys spring dresses and quilted jackets and walks to the theater on a hot day but feels some deep chill within her.

Esther is twenty-six and fluent in English when she meets the boy who will become her husband. He is small and gregarious and perpetually on the brink of loud and catching laughter. He meets her at the movie theater; he is a hospital orderly but he wants to be a bicyclist; he dreams of opening a bicycle shop; he sits her down on park benches and tells her about his plans. They’ll go somewhere far away, they’ll sell bikes, they’ll repair them, they’ll have a family.

The contents of his plans are not nearly as important to Esther as their sound—the deep sureness of them. And his voice! He has a soft voice, a voice like a piece of silk you might remove from a drawer only very occasionally, something you’d want to run your hands over again and again.

That she can be alive with this boy—share vanilla ice cream; stroll through markets, buy cabbages big as cannonballs—sometimes fills Esther with a paralyzing, breathtaking shame. Why should she get to see this? While the other girls could not? She feels as if pieces of her are barely held together—if she lets up for a moment, she will fly apart.

And yet isn’t there a blessedness, too? Isn’t she beginning to breathe again, the way an animal might breathe after running from a predator for a long time, and finally slowing, and looking up, and watching the leaves wave overhead in their multitudes? She was alive, she was still alive. She could lay her head on this boy’s chest and listen to the tumble of his heartbeat. She could stare at the crystal doorknob of her tiny ticket taker’s
booth for an entire afternoon, a pad of drawing paper in her lap, waiting for the evening sunlight to come through the left-hand window at the right angle. When it finally does it sprays prisms of color across the wall.

She and the boyfriend move to Ohio. They get married; they get a loan; they start his bicycle shop. Everything is round: rims, tires, sprockets, chain loops. Everything smells of chain grease; everyone pays in cash.

The arch of a handlebar, sweeping back to the grips. Thirty spoked wheels hanging from hooks; freewheels and hubs; chain stays and cranks; the concentric spirals of painted chain guards. A rack of bells: chrome, brass, aluminum. Suspended from a beam are hundreds of rims. Round-headed screws gleaming in pails. Bearings in jars, bearings in buckets. Sheaves of spokes tied with strips of cloth.

Esther works the cash register or opens her sketchpad on the glass counter and draws while her husband fiddles with a series of portable radios, a spectrum of American stations: country, jazz, folk, swing.

They have a son. After school he draws beside his mother at the counter, the two of them working on matching sheets of paper, and when he gets older he works beside his father, running the links of a salvaged bicycle chain back and forth through a basin of oil, watching the rust fall away, feeling the rivets ride cleanly in their bushings, lubricant beading in the little golden hairs on his wrists.

Out, away,
Auswanderung.
Esther builds for herself as modest and normal and steady a life as she can manage. She is not allowed to drive a car, her medication continues to give her upset stomachs, and occasionally she is seized with wild, clutching feelings of dread. At times her wrist throbs; she feels indistinct, and wonders if she might have died in that cellar
with the knothole, and considers the possibility that everything that has come after has been a dream. She reaches for her husband’s shape in the night; she clings to him.

It’s Mrs. Rosenbaum, still living on her houseboat in New Jersey, who sends her the deportation manifest. Esther is thirty-five years old when it arrives; it waits in the mailbox between a utility bill and an advertising flyer. Inside the first envelope is a second, and Esther waits two days to open it. By then she has decided that she knows what it will say.

She thinks: The others will be there but maybe Miriam will not. How could Miriam die? Miriam was never a person with illusions; she had always had the strength of her own pragmatism. Maybe only the deluded had been slaughtered. But of course everyone was slaughtered.

Forty cards. Several of them have hundreds of names on them.

It is easy enough to find July 29, 1942. Twelve birthdates, twelve girls. Miriam’s name among them. Esther’s, too.

24.

Robert’s voice grows fainter, as if Esther is receding behind him, as if he is still pulling her behind his bicycle and the trailer has uncoupled and the boy has pedaled off without noticing. Finally all Esther can hear as she sits on her deck on the last day of her life is Miriam’s voice. The backyard is gray at every hour; Robert is little more than a warm presence.

“At the edge of the city we found a forest,” Miriam’s voice says, “and we’ll have to go all the way through the forest. And then at the end we’ll climb a hill and when we reach the top, down below is mist, Esther, a thick ribbon of it, hiding the view. The vapors fall and condense and whirl around themselves.
But sometimes they part for a moment, and down there in that valley I saw a thousand tents, Esther, ten thousand maybe, each with a lamp burning inside it, all of them rustling and flapping in a breeze. A whole city of golden tents glowing down there beneath the mist.”

There is a pause. Then: “We’re going there, Esther. You and me. All of us.”

25.

At dusk on the fourth of July the woods echo with the explosions of neighbors’ fireworks. Robert nails a Catherine wheel to a tree and it sprays rainbows out into the night.

Esther sits on the deck with a blanket around her legs and a dreamy, lost expression on her face. Whenever Robert asks if she is uncomfortable it takes her a little while to reply that she is fine. At this very moment his parents are thirty-thousand feet above the Pacific, two little girls asleep in the seats between them.

The wheel spews a last paroxysm of sparks. The darkness reasserts itself. Robert clicks on a flashlight and rummages through his box for another firework. Fireflies float and flash in the trees.

“What about one more, Grandmom? We’ve got tons of these.”