The German Girl Read online

  “Don’t worry, Anna, I’ve already called an ambulance. Your mom will be fine. What time does your school bus arrive?” asks the only friend I have in the entire universe, who happens to own the noblest dog in our building.

  Mom can see the tears streaming down my cheeks, and it seems like this makes her sadder than ever. It’s like she’s ashamed and is asking me to forgive her, but she doesn’t have the strength to say a single word. I go over and hug her gently, so as not to hurt her.

  I dry my tears and run down to catch the bus. From the street I see Mr. Levin out on our balcony, making sure the driver picks me up. As I climb aboard and walk down the aisle to my seat, the other kids can tell I’ve been crying. I sit at the back, and the girl with braids in the row in front of me turns to look at me. I’m sure she thinks I’ve been punished because I’ve done something wrong: not finishing my homework, or cleaning my room, or eating my breakfast, or brushing my teeth before leaving the apartment.

  Today I find it impossible to concentrate in any of my classes. Luckily, the teachers don’t bother me with questions I can’t answer. I don’t know if Mom will have to spend some days in the hospital or if I’ll be able to live with Mr. Levin for a while.

  When I get home after school, my friend is out on the balcony again. I think this must mean Mom is in the hospital and that I will have to find somewhere else to stay.

  I get off the bus without saying good-bye to the driver, then wait near the entrance to our building for a few minutes because I don’t want to go in. I notice the first green shoots of the Boston ivy covering the side of our building.

  I pick up the mail, like I do every day, then rush up the stairs. When I enter, Tramp runs over and starts licking me. I sit on the floor and stroke him for a while, trying to postpone having to go into the living room. When I finally do, I see Mr. Levin, now with Tramp at his feet, and Mom in her leather armchair next to the open balcony door. Both of them are smiling. Mom stands up and strides over to me.

  “It was nothing more than a scare,” she whispers in my ear so that Mr. Levin won’t hear. “I promise it won’t happen again, my girl.”

  It has been a long time since she called me “my girl.”

  She starts stroking my hair. I close my eyes and snuggle against her chest the way I used to when I was little, when I really had no idea what had happened to Dad and was still hoping he might appear, walking through the door at any moment. I take a deep breath: she smells of clean clothes and soap.

  I hug her, and we stay like that for several minutes. All of a sudden, the room seems enormous, and I feel dizzy. Don’t move, stay like this a little longer. Hold me until you’re tired and can’t hug me anymore. Tramp comes to lick my feet and wake me from my daydream, but when I open my eyes, I see Mom is standing up, smiling, with color in her cheeks. She is beautiful again.

  “Her blood pressure dropped too far. Everything will be fine,” says Mr. Levin. Mom thanks him, pulls away from me, and goes into the kitchen.

  “Now we’ll have dinner,” she announces, entering a place that’s been foreign to her for the last couple of years.

  The table has already been set: napkins, plates, silverware for three. The smell of salmon with capers and lemon wafts from the oven. Mom carries the dish to the table, and we start to eat.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to a photo lab in Chelsea. I’ve called and arranged to see them.”

  This is what I need to hear to recover from today’s scare. I feel guilty somehow; I know that sometimes I’ve wished she wouldn’t wake up, that she’d never open her eyes again; just keep sleeping, free from pain. I don’t know how I could ask her to forgive me. But for now we’re going to find out who is in these photos. And I feel Mom is regaining control, or at least has more energy.

  I walk Mr. Levin back to his apartment. On the way, we run into a cranky neighbor who can’t stand the noblest dog in the building.

  “It’s a filthy dog they picked up in the street,” she has told our other neighbors several times. “Who knows, he may be covered in fleas.” They all think she’s crazy.

  But Tramp still greets her when he sees her. He doesn’t care that she rejects him. He has a droopy eye. He’s a bit deaf. There’s a kink in his tail. That’s why the old woman hates him. Mr. Levin rescued him and talks to him in French.

  “Mon clochard,” he calls him. He told me the dog used to belong to an old French woman who lived on her own like him and was found dead in La Touraine, one of the oldest apartment buildings on Morningside Drive.

  I remembered suddenly that Mom used to say, “We live in the French part of Manhattan,” in the days when she would tell me bedtime stories.

  When the janitor opened the old French lady’s door, Tramp escaped, and they couldn’t catch him. A week later, during one of his early-morning walks, Mr. Levin noticed the dog struggling up the steep steps of Morningside Park. Then Tramp sat down at his feet.

  “Mon clochard,” he called him, and the dog jumped for joy.

  Tramp obediently followed Mr. Levin, a stocky old man with bushy gray eyebrows, back to his apartment. From then on, he became his faithful companion. The day he introduced Tramp to me, he said very seriously, “Next year I’ll be eighty, and at that age, you count the minutes you have left. I don’t want the same thing to happen to my clochard as it did last time. The moment they break my door down to find out why I haven’t been answering, I want my dog to know the way to your home.”

  “Mon clochard,” I said to Tramp in my American accent, stroking him.

  Even though Mom has never let me have a pet—apart from fish, who don’t live even as long as a flower—she knows she can’t refuse to have Tramp come to live with us, because we owe it to my only friend.

  “Anna, Mr. Levin is going to live a long time yet, so don’t get your hopes up,” she told me when I insisted we’d have to look after his dog.

  To me, Mr. Levin doesn’t seem old or young. I know he’s not strong, because he walks very carefully, but his mind is still as active as mine. He has an answer for everything, and when he stares you in the eye, you really have to pay attention.

  Now Tramp doesn’t want me to leave and starts whimpering.

  “Come on, you bad-mannered dog,” Mr. Levin comforts him. “Little Miss Anna has more important things to do.”

  As he says good-bye to me at his front door, Mr. Levin touches his mezuzah. I notice a single old photograph on the wall. It shows him with his parents: a good-looking young man with a smile on his face and thick black hair. Who knows whether Mr. Levin remembers those years in his village that was then part of Poland. It was such a long time ago.

  “You’re a girl with an old soul,” he says, laying his heavy hand on my head and giving me a kiss on my brow.

  I don’t know what it means, but I take it as a compliment.

  I go into my bedroom to tell all the day’s events to Dad, who is waiting on my bedside table. Tomorrow we’ll drop off the negatives at the photo lab. I tell him about Tramp and Mr. Levin and the dinner Mom made. The only thing I don’t mention is the scare we had in the morning. I don’t want to worry him with things like that. Everything’s going to be all right, I know it.

  I feel more exhausted than ever. I can’t keep my eyes open. I find it impossible to go on talking or to switch the light off. I’m dozing off when I hear Mom come into the room and turn off my bedside lamp. The unicorns stop spinning and take a rest, just like me. Mom covers me with the purple bedspread and gives me a long, gentle kiss.

  The next morning, a ray of sunshine wakes me; I forgot to pull down the blinds. I get up startled, and for a few seconds I wonder: Was it all a dream?

  I hear noises outside my room. Somebody is in either the living room or the kitchen. I dress as fast as I can so I can find out what’s going on. I don’t even comb my hair.

  In the kitchen, Mom is cradling her coffee cup. She drinks slowly, smiles, and her brown eyes light up. She’s wearing a lilac blouse, dark-blue pants, and shoes
she calls “ballerina slippers.” She comes over and kisses me, and I don’t know why, but when I feel her near me, I close my eyes.

  I begin to eat breakfast quickly.

  “Take it easy, Anna . . .”

  But I want to finish as fast as possible. I want to find out who those people in the photos are, because I think we’re very close to discovering Dad’s family. The story of a ship that maybe sank in midocean.

  As we leave the apartment, I see Mom turn back briefly. She locks the door and stands there for a moment as if she’s changed her mind.

  When we get outside, she walks down the six front steps that have separated her from a world she has forgotten without holding on to the iron banister. When we reach the sidewalk, she takes me by the hand and makes me speed up. She seems like she wants to gulp down as much air as possible, even if it’s a bit cold, and feel the spring sunshine on her face. She smiles at the people we meet on the way. She seems free.

  Downtown at the photo lab in Chelsea, I have to help her open the heavy glass double doors. The man behind the counter, who is expecting us, puts on a pair of white gloves, spreads the rolls of negatives on a light box, and starts to examine them one by one through a magnifying glass.

  We have received a treasure from Havana. I am the detective in a mystery that is about to be revealed. The images we see are reversed: black becomes white; white, black. Our phantoms are about to come alive beneath powerful lamps and chemicals.

  We pause at one image in particular that is marked with a white cross. In the corner, there is a blurred inscription in German, which Mom translates for us: “Taken by Leo on 13 May 1939.” There’s a girl who looks a lot like me staring through the window of what the gray-haired man thinks could be a ship’s cabin.

  I think Mom is a bit worried when she sees me so excited by the negatives. She thinks I’m hoping they’ll provide too many answers and will be disappointed. Now we’ll have to figure out where they come from, which of Dad’s relatives appear in the photos, and what became of them. We know at least that one of them went to Cuba. What about the others?

  Dad was born at the end of 1959, but these negatives are over seventy years old, so we’re talking about the time my great-grandparents arrived in Havana. It’s possible my grandfather might also be among them, as a baby. Mom thinks they are photos from Europe and the sea crossing, when they were escaping the fast-approaching war.

  “Your dad was a man of few words,” she says again.

  In the taxi back home, she takes me by the hand so that I’ll give her my full attention. I know there’s another piece of news she wants to pass on, something she’s kept to herself all these years. She still thinks I’m too young to understand what happened to my family. I’m strong, Mom. You can tell me anything. I don’t like secrets. And it seems to me this family is full of them.

  It would have been easier if she’d just told me how I lost my father before I entered kindergarten at Fieldston. But Mom always insisted on saying the same thing: “Your father left one day and didn’t come back.” That was all.

  “I think it’s time you knew something. On your father’s side, you’re German as well,” she says with a slight smile, as if apologizing.

  I don’t respond. I don’t react.

  When the taxi turns onto the West Side Highway, I open the window. The cold breeze from the Hudson River and the noise of the traffic prevent Mom from continuing. I can’t stop thinking about this latest piece of news.

  By the time we get home, my cheeks are red and freezing. We bump into Mr. Levin with Tramp; after their walk, they often rest on the stoop.

  “Can I stay here for a while?” I ask Mom, who smiles in reply.

  “When will the photos be ready?” Mr. Levin wants to know, but Tramp is all over me, tickling me so much I can’t answer. Tramp is a very badly behaved dog, but he’s very cute.

  As soon as I reach the apartment, I go straight to my bedroom. In front of the mirror, I try to discover the German traits I must have inherited from a father who up till now I thought was Cuban. What do I see in the mirror? A German girl. Aren’t I a Rosen?

  When I ask her later, Mom tells me that the Rosen family left Germany in 1939 and settled in Havana.

  “That’s all I know, Anna,” she says. Instead of going to bed, she sits in her armchair to read.

  I don’t know why I learned Spanish. German would have been better. I have it in my blood, don’t I?

  The German girl.

  Hannah

  Berlin, 1939

  Dinner was served. The dining room had become our prison, with its dark wood paneling that no one polished anymore. The ceiling, with its heavy square moldings, looked as if it could fall on our heads at any moment.

  We didn’t have any staff in the house now: they had all left. Including Eva, who was there when I was born. It wasn’t safe for her, and she didn’t want to see us suffer. Although I thought that, in fact, she’d abandoned us because she didn’t want to find herself faced with the choice of having to inform on us.

  Secretly, though, Eva hadn’t stopped coming, and Mama went on paying her as if she were still our maid.

  “She’s part of the family,” she explained to Papa whenever he warned her that we had to cut back on our spending or we would be left penniless in Berlin.

  Sometimes Eva brought us bread, or cooked at home and came with the food in an enormous pot for us to reheat. She had a key and used to come in through the front door. Now she had to enter through the service entrance, so that Frau Hofmeister could not see her from the window.

  That woman was always snooping around; she was the building’s vigilante. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck. Whenever I went out into the street, her gaze followed me and weighed me down. She was a leech who would have given anything to get her hands on one of Mama’s dresses, to get into our apartment and carry off the jewels, bags, and handmade shoes that never would have fit her pudgy feet.

  “Money doesn’t buy good taste,” Mama declared.

  Frau Hofmeister spent a fortune on dresses, but on her they always looked borrowed.

  I couldn’t understand why Mama used to dress and make herself up as if she were going out to a party. She even used to wear false eyelashes, which gave her drooping eyes an even more languid air. She had huge eyelids, “ideal for makeup,” as her friends said. But she applied only a little color to her face: pink and white, with black and a little gray around the eyes. Lipstick was only for special occasions.

  Our dining room grew bigger with every passing day. I slumped in my chair and peered at my parents in the distance. I couldn’t make out their faces; their features were blurred. The only light came from the lamp hanging over the table, which gave the white china plates a pale-orange tint.

  We were hemmed in around a rectangular mahogany table with sturdy legs. Next to Papa’s plate, I saw an edition of Das Deutsche Mädel—The German Girl: the propaganda magazine of the League of German Girls. All my friends—or, rather, my female classmates—had subscriptions to it, but Papa would not allow me to bring a copy of that “printed rubbish” home. I couldn’t understand why he had one beside him now. Could we start eating? They both looked preoccupied, their heads lowered. They seemed not to dare talk to me. They silently lifted spoonfuls of soup to their mouths in unison and had trouble swallowing them. Neither of them even glanced at me. What had I done? Papa paused and looked up. Now he was staring at me. He turned the magazine over and pushed it toward me with suppressed rage.

  I couldn’t believe it. What was going to become of me? Leo would hate me. I would have to forgo our daily meetings at midday in Frau Falkenhorst’s café. Nobody would drink hot chocolate with me anymore. The baker’s boy had been right, Leo. You should have left me. Don’t come looking for me.

  On the cover of this magazine for pure young girls—the ones who don’t bear the stains of their four grandparents, the ones with small, snub noses, skin as white as foam, blond hair, and eyes bluer than the sky i
tself, where there is no room for any imperfection—there I was, smiling, my eyes fixed on the future. I had become the “German girl” of the month.

  The dining room seemed empty. Not even the sound of spoons dipping into the wretched bowls of soup could be heard. No one spoke to me. No one reproached me.

  “It wasn’t my fault, Papa! Believe me!”

  The photographer we had thought was an informer had turned out to be an Ogre who worked for Das Deutsche Mädel. I’d thought that even though that day I had scrubbed myself so hard my skin had peeled, he had discovered my stain, and that was why he had photographed me.

  “How could he have got it wrong?” I asked, but nobody answered.

  “You’re dirty, Hannah. I don’t want to see you like that at the table,” said Mama, and for the first time, to hear myself called dirty was like a caress. Yes, I was, and I wanted the world to know I didn’t care about being dirty, stained, rumpled. I wanted to tell my parents that but couldn’t, because, in the end, we were all dirty. Nobody was saved. Not even the smart, haughty Alma Strauss, who now was just another Rosenthal, as dirty as the undesirables who lived crammed into rooms in the Spandauer Vorstadt quarter. Not even Papa, the eminent professor Max Rosenthal, who was now pacing up and down sadly, staring at the floor.

  I left the table and went to change clothes to please my mother. I put on a short-sleeved white dress that had been perfectly ironed. Is this what you like, Mama? I won’t wear this dress the day we have to leave everything behind. I couldn’t move. If I did, it would stretch. If I sat down, it would get creased. Even a single tear could stain it. And I soaped my hands so much, they still smelled of sulfate when I returned to the dining table. As I was sipping another spoonful of soup, Mama looked me up and down, but without any bitterness.

  Papa sighed. He picked up the magazine and put it in his briefcase.

  “Perhaps your face on the cover of that magazine will be useful someday,” he said resignedly. “The damage is done.”

  “Can we eat in peace now?” said Mama.