The German Girl (17 page)

She left the cabin as if she owned the ship, eager to breathe fresh air for the first time in many months.

We were still in Europe. I suddenly heard the noises of another port. I was longing to be out on the high seas, and was irritated by the seagulls swooping around us, the smell of fish and dried blood mixed with rust and the grease from the engines, as well as the blare of ships approaching and leaving the dock.

Out on deck, I saw Mama near the rail. She was being served tea while she stared down at the port of Cherbourg, France, carefully observing the thirty-eight passengers coming on board. Apparently she
did not recognize any of them, for she moved away to one of the deck chairs on the starboard side of the ship.

I didn’t think she was going to make friends with any of the other women in first class. She watched as they passed by and greeted them in a friendly enough manner but then readjusted her dark glasses and ignored all those elegant women who might wish to sit beside her. She was enjoying being alone. Spending all those months in confinement with the shutters drawn and never going out to see her friends had made her antisocial.

I knew the sea air would suit Mama. She seemed free, and could wear all her best outfits, show off her jewels, have someone always at her beck and call. But she seemed hesitant about going back into the ballroom. When she had opened the door the previous evening, she had seen a red-white-and-black flag on the back wall. She had grimaced with disgust in a way only I noticed, and left without a word. She went straight to talk to the captain. Nobody knew what she said, but the fact was that by morning the flag had disappeared. The first thing she did even before breakfast was to go to the ballroom to see whether the captain had kept his word.

“As long as we’re at sea, he will look after us,” she said later. “He’s a true gentleman.”

The ship began shuddering, and there was another blast on the horn. Now we really were under way.

Behind her dark glasses, Mama smiled peacefully in a way I had never seen before.

Leo came up behind me and covered my eyes. His hands were moist. I joined in the game and asked if he was Papa.

Laughing out loud, he tugged at my arm as hard as he could. He ruled the roost in first class. He came and went on our deck as if he were its lord and master. He was no longer afraid that someone would send him back to his father’s tourist-class cabin. His place was here with me. The captain and all the stewards knew this.

I loved seeing Leo dressed smartly. His brown jacket with big buttons
and breast pockets made him look older, but his short trousers and long stockings gave away his age.

He stepped back so that I could give my opinion, spreading his arms as if to ask what I thought of his transatlantic attire, and nervously awaited my verdict. I looked him up and down without a word. I was making him suffer, and he grew desperate.

“Aren’t you going to tell me how I look?”

“Like a perfect count,” I mocked him, and he guffawed.

“And you are the only countess on board, Hannah,” he replied before dashing over to the side to start his tour of first class.

If anybody was leaning against the rail, he apologized and waited for the person to make way for him; he would not allow any modification to the route he had planned for his close study of the ship where we were going to spend the next fortnight.

I followed along like his faithful consort. This was the first time I had ever seen him happy.

Cable from the Hamburg-Amerika Line

“I
’ve been here hours,” said Leo, leaning back against one of the iron columns on the terrace.

“Look, I’ve brought you a cookie. I was supposed to keep it until bedtime.”

“To the engine room!”

“What? That’s the only place I’ve been told not to go to, Leo!”

Several couples were strolling along the promenade deck, finding out where things were. There was a beauty salon, a small shop selling souvenirs from the ship, postcards, and silk scarves. I didn’t think anybody would want to waste the ten reichsmarks we’d been allowed to take out of Germany on any of that.

We went down six levels and then along a lengthy corridor that ended at a heavy iron door. When Leo opened it, the noise was deafening, and the smell of burnt grease made me feel queasy. If I had leaned
against the wall I could have ruined my blue-and-white-striped dress. I didn’t want to upset Mama.

Leo was peering curiously at the complicated machinery that propelled the giant we were sailing on. If it had been up to him, he would have spent hours watching the pistons moving to and fro with their precise, unchanging rhythm. But all at once, he abandoned his observation post.

“Let’s go back up with the others!” he shouted to me, his voice swallowed up by the noise of the engines. He set off at a run.

He had already made several friends on the
St. Louis.
It was as if he’d been on board for months. We climbed up to the fourth deck, where there was a group of boys waiting impatiently for us—or, rather, for Leo.

A tall boy with a silly-looking face stood up as Leo approached. He was wearing a tilted cap, and his cheeks were ruddy from the cold air.

“Edmund, you’ll catch a cold,” shouted his mother, who was wrapped in a thick brown blanket under one of the deck awnings.

Edmund paid her no attention, beyond stamping the floor like a baby about to have a tantrum.

There were two other boys as well. They were brothers, the younger one informed me, introducing himself as Walter and his older brother as Kurt, who ignored me. They both wore hats and jackets that looked enormous on them, as did their shoes and their stockings hanging loose round their ankles. I guessed their parents had bought them clothes for the journey several sizes too large so that they would last many months in Cuba, and probably wherever they were headed after that.

“So you’re the famous Hannah, the ‘German girl,’ ” said Walter slyly. I realized he was the same age as me or possibly a little bit older.

I pretended not to have heard him. Leo tried to break the ice by launching into a description of the ship: its funnel, the bridge, the mast, which was the tallest part of the ship, the difference between port and starboard. He spoke of the captain as if he were a close friend who consulted him every night about the decisions he’d have to make and then carry out first thing the next morning.

I knew someone was bound to mention “the German Girl” sooner or later. That wretched front cover of
Das Deutsche Mädel
was going to pursue me all my life. Yes, I was the German girl: So what? I felt like telling him,
I might be very German, but I’m as undesirable as you.

“Did you know there’s a swimming pool on board?” said Kurt, constantly trying to keep his hat out of his eyes. “When we’re in the mid-Atlantic it’ll be less cold, and they’ll open it. Did you bring your bathing suits?”

The silly-looking boy suggested we go play on the promenade deck, but Leo didn’t listen to him. We were merely there as followers of the most popular passenger on the
St. Louis.
He was the one in control; the one who gave the orders. All that was missing was the white peaked cap with the black visor that the captain wore. And so we all ignored Walter’s suggestion.

In fact, all we did was rush about from one spot to the next, but that was enough for Leo to master the whole ship’s layout. He had already memorized the labyrinths leading to the cabins, the ballrooms, the gym, and the captain’s control rooms, where the crew got together to play cards and smoke. Leo came and went as he liked in the most unimaginable places. And nobody stopped him.

The children had grouped themselves according to age. The youngest remained under supervision. The girls would not have dreamed of mixing with the boys, and must have looked on me strangely, I thought, because I belonged to Leo’s gang. Walter, the clumsier of the brothers—since we’d met, he had fallen, lost his hat, and gotten left behind so often that we were on the verge of abandoning him—bumped into one of the snooty girls pretending to be adolescents.

“Watch where you’re going if you don’t want problems,” said the tallest girl, who was wearing a grotesque sailor’s cap and dark glasses that kept sliding down her nose. “And you, what are you doing with this band of thugs? Why don’t you stay here with us? Frau Rosenthal wouldn’t be pleased if she found out you were going around with those boys.”

I halted for a moment, not because I had any interest in being
friendly with these girls, who had been educated for just one thing in life—to get married—but because I was tired from running around so much. Leo would come find me.

The girl in dark glasses was a Simons. Her family had owned several stores in Berlin. In order not to lose their fortune, they handed over ownership of their businesses to a “pure” German who was related to them in some way. However, they ended up exactly the same as us, fleeing to Cuba at the last minute.

Mama had known Johanna Simons, the matriarch of the family. They once went to Paris on a shopping trip together, and after that, I had to be friendly to their daughter Ines for what seemed like an endless couple of hours in the Adlon tearoom while our mothers discussed the season’s drapes, designs, and colors. Ines had shot up since then, and I didn’t recognize her.

“Let’s go to the tearoom. They have cookies and cakes there,” she said, and walked off, sure that we would all follow her.

The tearoom looked as if it had never been used. How could such a huge ship, carrying a thousand passengers on each voyage and sailing for several months each year, be kept in such perfect condition? The carpets were spotless. The gilded braid on the chairs was as good as new, the lace tablecloths without a single stain, the silver spoons polished and engraved with the emblem of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The lighting, which was quite dim at that time of day, cast a pale-pink glow over us. Mama would have said that, in a light like that, everybody could look beautiful.

“That’s how we Germans are,” Ines said proudly as she surveyed the room.

Oh, Ines. Germans?
I felt like shouting at her: “It’s time you stop thinking you are one of them. Better remember where you find yourself!” We were about to begin a new life in some remote spot in the Caribbean Sea, where the rest of the world was no more than a hope we could not have.

“In Havana,” she said, “we’ll be in transit with the Rosenthal family. My mother told me we’ll be going first to the Hotel Nacional for a few days, and then we’ll settle in New York.” Ines lived Frau Simons’s fantasies. Her head was always in the clouds, Mama used to say.

At the far end of the room, a young woman was sitting on her own, a picture of sadness. She held a cup of tea in her hands, not once raising it to her lips or setting it down. Her dark dress made her look a little older than she probably was, but with her hair partially obscuring her eyes, I found it hard to tell. She must have been about twenty years old.

“It’ll be hard for her to find a husband now,” declared Ines, as if she were an expert with a line of suitors waiting outside her front door. “Her name is Else. Mama admits she has very pretty legs, but a girl who only gets compliments about her legs can’t be very pretty, can she?”

The two other girls laughed at her joke as they sipped their tea. I wanted to get out of there; it was worse than playing with dolls. Luckily, at that moment, Leo appeared in the doorway. He was looking for me and signaled that I should come follow him. My savior! There was no time to lose: we had less than two weeks left in a place where we could do whatever we liked.

Copies of
Der Stürmer
had been left next to the deck chairs. It looked as if some of the crew didn’t like us or were trying to intimidate us. I for one had no intention of reading the headlines, but Leo glanced at them and suddenly grew serious.

“They’re attacking us back in Berlin,” he said, adopting his typically conspiratorial tone and striding off. “They’re talking about us in the papers. This is going to end badly. They accuse those of us on the
St. Louis
of stealing money and looting works of art.”

Let them say what they like, Leo
. We had managed to get away; they could not force us to return. We were in international waters and would soon arrive at an island where we had been given permission to stay indefinitely, although many of us would live in the tropics only for a few weeks. We would wait for the magic number to come up on the waiting list so that we could enter New York, the real island, with our immigrant visas.

A little later, Leo and I noticed the captain giving the stewards orders in a low voice. They quickly began to gather up all the newspapers.

Leo stood at attention and saluted him. The captain smiled at him and raised his hand to his brow.

T
he only people Mama felt comfortable with on board were the Adlers, although perhaps they were a little too old to share a late night with. Their cabin was two doors from ours, and every time we went out on deck, we had to say hello to them. Since he came on board, Mr. Adler had refused to get out of bed. His meals were taken to him, but he rarely tasted them. Mrs. Adler was very worried: she had never seen him like that before.

“It was very painful for him to have to send his son and daughter-in-law on ahead to America. He hasn’t recovered from that separation,” Mrs. Adler told us. “He thought things would settle down in a few months, but instead the situation grew worse. We’ve lost everything. Our whole lives!”

While she was talking to us, Mrs. Adler held cold compresses to the forehead of this old, white-bearded man who did not even open his eyes the whole time we were there. We watched as his wife gently looked
after him. Now she was dabbing on some mentholated oil that brought tears to my eyes.