The Daughter's Tale Read online

  Now, when Julius arrived home his first kiss was for Viera. He appeared later and later each night, because since the birth of their child his patients had almost doubled in number.

  “My little Viera has brought us good luck,” he would say, referring to the cardiac problems that were proliferating in the German capital. This National Socialist euphoria has shrunk many people’s hearts¸ thought Amanda.

  When Julius moved away from her, Viera’s lips trembled; she screwed up her dark eyes and began to wail, her whole body turning bright red. He would pick her up, almost asleep, and rock her to the rhythm of her pulse, his movements echoing the beats of this tiny heart that had come into the world with the force of a tornado.

  “My little Viera,” Julius whispered to her, though she could not yet understand. “Whenever you’re afraid and can feel your heart racing, start counting its beats. Count them and think of each one, because you’re the only person who can control them. As the silence between one beat and the next grows, your fear will start to disappear. We need those silences to exist, to think.”

  The child’s wails grew less frequent, and Amanda also felt at peace with the sound of Julius’s voice.

  “In summer we’ll rent a house at Wannsee, next to the lake,” he suggested before going to bed. Amanda hugged him with all her remaining strength.

  In the darkness, Julius lay gazing at the delicate lines of his sleeping wife’s face, which seemed to be withering with each passing day.

  On Friday afternoons, though, despite the cold and rain, Amanda blossomed. Hilde came to visit her after midday, when her classes finished in the eastern part of the city. If the weather was bad, they would settle by the window and drink exotic herbal teas that Hilde brought back from her trips to Paris, and watch people scurrying by in the rain. If it was sunny, they would stroll down the avenues pushing Viera’s baby carriage. A thick mop of reddish hair was already growing on her head, and the first freckles had sprouted on her cheeks. The baby enjoyed these walks, and the bouncing of the carriage on the cobbles sent her gently to sleep. They would stop off at Georg’s café near Olivaer Platz and beneath the dim amber light of lamps that had once been gas-lit, warm themselves in the hope that the spring would quickly give way to summer.

  If Viera became anxious, Amanda would take her in her arms, cradle her, and whisper in her ear, “One day we’ll go to Greece and live on one of the islands, far from all of this. Papa will open his practice with views over the sea . . .”

  “Viera is the spitting image of her father,” Hilde would comment, which made Amanda swell with pride.

  Hilde wasn’t very maternal, but she loved to be included in her friend’s fantasies. Her family lived in the south of Germany, but she had come to Berlin to study. When she qualified as an elementary school teacher, her parents bought her a small apartment in Mitte and she gave classes on Greek mythology at a nearby private girls’ school she loathed. She was fascinated by French literature, and although she had only a basic knowledge of the language, she read the German translations she used to find in the Garden of Letters.

  From behind, she looked like an adolescent. She went to the hairdresser every week to keep her hair cropped to show her neck and the angular line of her chin. Her thick, dark eyebrows and black eyes contrasted with her lips, which were always a bright crimson. When she was emotional or frightened, red blotches would appear on her throat and chest, as if blood were seeping through her pores.

  Whenever she had some free days from teaching, she would travel to Paris by train to meet her girlfriends in the capital of leisure and celebration. “Life is more lighthearted in Paris,” she told Amanda.

  She was the black sheep of the family, Hilde explained, because she had made it very clear she would never get married, much less bring children into a world she was ashamed of. Since her ideas were anathema to the new Germany and could cause her problems, her family attempted to keep her safe by helping her financially so that she could travel and continue to live in the capital where they, conservatives from the south, hoped there would be greater tolerance for her rebellious ideas.

  “I’m going to Paris next Friday to see some of my friends. I need a bit of fresh air; this city is choking me. I can only breathe easily when I’m with you.”

  Amanda imagined Hilde and her friends all dressed in baggy pants and with modern haircuts, perfumed with herbal and wood essences, as they strolled down the narrow streets leading to the Seine, visiting the bookshops in Le Marais or searching in the bouquiniste stalls for a lost edition of a classic.

  Every Friday when she and Hilde returned home before sunset, Hilde helped her cook dinner for Julius, they put Viera to bed, and lit two small candles in the dining room lined with empty bookshelves.

  One day after her Paris trip, Hilde appeared with handfuls of Swiss chocolates and bags of aromatic teas.

  “You have to convince Julius to move to Paris,” she told Amanda. “If you could see the streets in Le Marais . . . You’d be free there, you might even be able to open your bookstore again. Though sometimes I wonder if I should continue going there. They don’t like Germans. They all say that Germany’s warlike attitude could start another conflict like in nineteen-fourteen. God help us . . .”

  Amanda was overwhelmed by her friend’s insistence that they should pack their bags and leave the city they had always considered theirs, yet she felt it was inevitable.

  “Lots of families like yours have moved from here to Le Marais. You both speak French, so what more do you need?”

  Yes, everyone was fleeing, and according to the newspapers the stories of those who were leaving were increasingly sordid. Amanda had decided to cut herself off from the slander on the radio and in the press. They kept repeating over and over that the emigrants had stolen their family fortunes and abandoned their old folk in run-down apartments with no electricity or hot water. That they left their children, with a star of David around their necks, in church doorways.

  “This summer we’re going to the lake,” Amanda responded calmly, to put a stop to any thought of exile. Her husband wasn’t yet ready for it. But she was.

  4

  During their stay that summer in the house by the lake at Wannsee, Amanda told her husband she was pregnant again. Neither of them greeted this news with great enthusiasm: they found it hard to imagine raising another child in this environment of fear and darkness.

  One morning, a moving shadow appeared on the path to the house. Julius went to the front door, and Amanda glimpsed him talking, crestfallen, with the owner, while she kept her eye on Viera, who by now could crawl and hide in corners. When Julius came back, he stood in silence for a few seconds, and Amanda immediately understood. She picked up her daughter and turned to him.

  “I’m ready for anything. Tell me what it is,” she said, trying to show her husband she was stronger now, that he should trust her and rely on her.

  “We have to return to the city,” Julius said, and slumped into the armchair facing the garden. “He can’t rent the house to us any longer. The new racial laws don’t permit it. He wouldn’t take the rent for next week. If we stay, the police will come and make a complaint.”

  “Well then, there’s nothing left to say. Come on, Viera, it’s time to go home.”

  Later that day, the three of them sat in the back of the car as the driver silently returned them to Berlin. Entering the city, Amanda found that every corner looked the same, every building like the next one. A stifling monotony. The soldiers multiplied like flies, all of them identical: lined up with a sickly perfection and stuffed into stiff uniforms, they looked like toy soldiers, each one with the same outline. Their driver was one of them. Everything seemed identical until they came to the yellowing building that had once been moss green, and on whose ground floor a beautiful bookstore had once proudly stood.

  The spring had been a hope; the summer, a waste. By the time the harsh winter arrived, catching Amanda by surprise and forcing her indoors during her l
ate pregnancy, Viera was becoming increasingly active around their apartment. In the early months Amanda had suffered badly from morning sickness, and during the last trimester she could feel the baby in constant movement, above all at bedtime. It would be a daughter, she was certain of that, and her name would be Lina. Sometimes the baby’s kicks startled Amanda, and her groans woke Julius and alarmed him. She knew she ought to eat, but the price of even staple foods had reached exorbitant levels, and she wanted to make sure that Viera, who had a voracious appetite, stayed healthy.

  Lina Sternberg was born in the middle of the night a few days before the arrival of spring in 1935. Amanda was happy, because now she would be able to go out with the baby and Viera to enjoy the sunshine, and because the rainy, cloudy days were coming to an end in a Berlin that seemed to her increasingly alien. Sometimes she would turn a corner and not recognize where she was, feeling like a dissonant note drowning in an unvarying city.

  This daughter who had been so active in the last part of the pregnancy turned out to be a serene baby who slept all the time. The hardest thing proved to be breastfeeding her, because soon after drinking some of her mother’s warm breast milk she would fall fast asleep. Julius was worried that she wasn’t putting on weight as she should, and thought she was too small for a baby of her age.

  “She’ll grow; she’s a healthy child,” Amanda reassured him. “Give her time. We’re all different. You can’t expect her to be like Viera.”

  By the time Lina was a few months old, her most prominent feature was a pair of deep blue eyes. When she was awake, she observed everything that came within her sight so intensely it was disturbing. She never smiled.

  She began to walk before her first birthday, and would follow her sister everywhere. They were inseparable: one of them with reddish hair and honey-colored eyes, the other with shiny golden curls and an intense blue gaze. They were so happy playing together that Amanda had more time for her chores and could enjoy her Friday afternoon meetings with Hilde more fully.

  It was Lina who gave their home its rhythm and who led the games with her sister. When he came home from work, Julius would hold her in his arms; she would lean her head against her father’s chest and imitate the pumping of his heart, moving her head as if the force of the heartbeats were making it bounce. Julius would smile and call her “my little one.”

  He was only concerned that she was still tiny and weak. That fall, whenever there was a cold spell, she caught a fever and a cough and refused to eat. Eating was a nuisance for her: the world was much more fascinating than a colorless plate of food, exploring it much preferred to sitting at table for an hour raising one boring spoonful of food after another to her mouth.

  By the time she was eighteen months old, Lina had already learned to speak and was very advanced for a girl of her age. Sometimes she even seemed more mature than her sister; to listen to them you would have thought she was older than Viera. It was only her size that gave the game away.

  Before their bedtime, Julius would pick them both up in his arms and rush around the apartment like a whirlwind, telling them stories about the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans, about sacred scarabs, pitched battles, wide oceans, nomadic tribes, slaves. Sometimes he would talk to them about crazy philosophers, or experts who studied the heart, inventions that would save humanity in the next hundred years, as though he were speaking in a university lecture hall. To please their father, the girls would open their eyes wide in alarm, and then burst out laughing in a way that made him the happiest man on earth.

  “Is that how you put them to sleep?” Amanda would interrupt them, colluding in a game that she secretly prayed would never end.

  5

  One night in early November 1938, Amanda woke with a start. She went to the window and saw some of their neighbors out in the street, staring up at the sky. One of them noticed her and shouted with a dismay that had become all too familiar:

  “The synagogue on Fasanenstrasse is on fire!”

  Amanda closed the window and, with the resignation of the condemned, went back to bed in a useless attempt to get back to sleep.

  The next morning, Julius found the windows of his practice smashed, a shaky star daubed by enraged fingers on the front wall, and next to it a word that had become hateful and was now to be found all over the city: Jude. When he stepped inside, Julius found stones everywhere. Shortly afterward, his secretary arrived. Without the slightest hint of sympathy, she told him she would have to quit.

  Julius sat on the sofa in the waiting room to see who would be the first heroic patient to defy the orders of this supposedly perfect race. But not a single one came, that day or the next; no one even called to cancel their appointments. Taking from his pocket two gold chains from which hung tiny six-pointed stars, he gloomily read the inscriptions bearing the name of his daughters.

  “What’s the sense of the girls wearing these now,” he murmured to himself. “What protections would they offer?”

  That Friday, Amanda went for her usual walk through the neighborhood with Hilde and the girls. The smell of fire and ashes still hung in the air; the sidewalks were strewn with broken glass. In the distance, a thin spiral of smoke rose from the ruins of what had been Berlin’s most beautiful synagogue. They reached Georg’s café, which was a little emptier than on previous Fridays, and were ordering their tea when a policeman came in. He silently scrutinized all the customers’ faces.

  “Yet another toy soldier,” Amanda said. “They could change them every day and I’m sure their families wouldn’t notice. They all think the same, have the same voice, the same face, the same look. Even their souls have been diluted into the same terrifying uniformity. We are the others. But do you know something, Hilde? I’m growing tired of being the other . . .”

  The policeman left the café and, with the help of a group of youngsters, clumsily drew a six-pointed star on the front of the building. They, the others, the different ones, simply remained in their seats. They were used to the insult: What could they do?

  That night, Amanda waited until Julius was asleep to get up and go to sit alone in the living room, close by the window. She needed some time to herself, without Hilde, the girls, without her husband. She had to order her thoughts, although she had no clear idea why. It was already too late. The damage was done. She sometimes thought that it was for the best that her parents had died and her brother Abraham had gone off to Cuba, leaving just in time to escape the barbarism engulfing her and her family, drowning them minute by minute without any hope of a rescuing hand. Their two daughters were all that she and Julius had.

  She knew now was the moment to leave, but there was no welcoming shore. The larvae had been laid in every corner of a rotting Berlin and were reproducing with a terrifying hatred to devour everything that was not like them or prevented them from spreading everywhere. They had infected the whole city, the whole country, and now they aimed to contaminate the entire continent, perhaps even the entire world. Their goal had no bounds: the universe itself was to be perfectly Aryan.

  The following Friday somebody knocked at the front door with disturbing insistence. Amanda went downstairs while Hilde and the girls were drinking hot chocolate and eating fruit preserves, behaving as if life were still normal. A patient, his face distorted with anguish and fear, had brought a message from Julius.

  “They’ve taken him away,” cried the old man, who was obviously ill. “They’re closing all the doors on us, Frau Sternberg.”

  Amanda spoke before she could react. “Where did they take him?”

  “To the gestapo office on Oranienburger Strasse. At least that’s what they said; who knows if it’s true. They have the power to do whatever they like.”

  Amanda grabbed her coat and handbag, and left the girls with Hilde. Without any questions, or explanations, or saying thank you or goodbye.

  The city was in tumult. Everybody was rushing aimlessly from north to south, east to west, bumping into one another with no gesture of compas
sion or apology. She tried to hail a taxi, but they all shot past without stopping, and so she decided the only possibility was to take the S-Bahn to Mitte: What did she care now for any disapproving looks?

  When she reached the gestapo office she saw several women inquiring about their relatives, but no one was giving any answers. There was nothing to be done until they had an up-to-date list of those arrested. Someone suggested they might be in the former old people’s home on Grosse Hamburger Strasse.

  There were still traces of the great synagogue near the gestapo office. The wind blew a scrap of parchment into Amanda’s face. On it was written a phrase in Hebrew that she avoided deciphering. Perhaps her destiny was written there, and she wasn’t yet ready to confront it. At her feet were bits of wood reduced to embers; all around her was a permanent column of smoke, as if the fire refused to be extinguished.

  She entered the old building, and a young soldier immediately led her up to the office. Maybe he singled her out because unlike the other women who were shouting or sobbing desperately, Amanda remained astonishingly calm. She climbed the stairs resolutely behind the toy soldier.

  “Who are you inquiring about?”

  “My husband.”

  “Is your husband a communist?”

  Amanda said nothing. She realized that this callow soldier had confused her with one of them. He had not realized she belonged to the others, was another one of those howling for their relatives at the entrance, mingling with the ruins of a place of worship that for him should never have existed.

  “Jewish? What are you doing with a Jewish husband?”