Let Me Go (5 page)

Fraulein Inge must have read my mind: She goes and opens the window. My mother turns around, stares at Eva, and shouts radiantly: "That's where I saw that man Silberberg again! In the camp! When he arrived, he dared to use my name at the Aufnahmebaracke, can you imagine?"

She looks around as though expecting a burst of applause.

"He used my name because we once bumped into each other at your villa"—and here she glances accusingly at Eva—"in the mistaken belief that it might ensure more considerate treatment for his daughter, that it might even save her from the rat poison!" She cackles shrilly, winking at the bystanders.

I know the story.

Silberberg had been transported to Birkenau with his aged parents, his gravely ill wife, and their three children of five, six, and thirteen. The oldest, Edith, was sent to be a forced laborer in a munitions factory near the Lager. She survived Auschwitz, and Eva had had an emotional reunion with her in Berlin in 1968. After the war she had married a music teacher, who watched gently over her nightmare-torn nights. The ghost of Birkenau would not leave her be. For a long time she couldn't hold down any kind of food and suffered from serious panic attacks. Before finding a semblance of serenity, she had to undergo a course of psychotherapy that lasted for years.

Her father, after arriving in Birkenau, had been sent to one of the feared external camps, where he died. Many of the inmates worked underground, opening up galleries in the rocky walls. The clothing and food were scant and inferior, hygiene was appalling, the risk of typhus was extremely high, and cholera and petechial fever wiped out the workforce over the course of a few months. Silberberg's parents, his sick wife, and his young children had been immediately sent to the gas chambers.

I AM ALREADY exhausted and glance guiltily at Fräulein Inge, who all at once takes control of the situation. First she asks the onlookers to move away, after which she tries to take my mother by surprise with diversionary tactics.

"Why don't you show me that?" she asks, pointing at the teddy bear sticking out of the bag.

"No, it's mine!" my mother protests with the obstinacy of a child.

"Just for a moment," Fräulein Inge insists with a smile.

"Won't!" she repeats crossly.

And all of a sudden she changes tack. She turns to me with a sweet and disarming expression, smiles, and tries to coax me.

"I can keep it, can't I?" she asks, gesturing with her head toward the teddy bear. No, I don't want her to keep it; I don't want her to have it.

Fraulein Inge acts as if she intends to take it out of the bag, but my mother, with a swiftness that surprises me, grabs her arm.

"Ah, you see, you can't trick me—I'm not decrepit yet!"

In the confusion, however, the teddy bear has ended up on the floor. My mother stares at it anxiously. "Pick him up, someone, I want him! He's mine. I don't want anyone else to have him."

Eva leans forward and hands it to her. My mother takes advantage of the situation to address her reproachfully: "So you're Eva, Ludwig and Margarete's daughter?"

She looks her insolently up and down.

"Yes," she concedes, "you were very pretty as a girl, but you're old now."

I feel my irritation mounting; I'd like to intervene, but I can't.

"Your mother was very pretty too," she continues, apparently having recovered her memory all of a sudden, "but she was vain. She had her breasts reduced, but in those days the doctors weren't terribly good at things like that. The surgeon was an idiot, and he left her with horrible scars. They leaked pus after the operation."

She cackles. "I certainly had no need of that, and in any case . . . I've always been absolutely terrified of hospitals."

She leans her head forward, runs her tongue over her purple lips. She changes the subject:

"What happened to your villa?"

"It was bombed," Eva replies.

"Oh yes, I remember: Your father had Speer's bunker built on your property."

That was true—it was thanks to Speer's bunker that Eva, her mother, two of their servants, and their cat, Berny, had managed to survive.

It was a small and attractive construction, planned to protect anyone inside from the force of the bombing. The building was designed by Albert Speer himself, the Führer's architect, then his Minister of Munitions. Of course, it was very expensive, and only very wealthy people could have afforded it.

My mother, who is well aware of this, sniggers: "If your father hadn't been rich, you wouldn't be here today." And she gives Eva a hard shove on the shoulder.

Suddenly she frowns. "Speer, the traitor," she explodes, full of rancor. "He should have been hanged, and instead he got off with a prison sentence." Her mood is rapidly darkening, as though the case had only just been reported.

"And he wanted to suffocate the Führer, and everyone else in the bunker," she goes on furiously. She has slipped into the past tense without noticing.

It is true, Speer did contemplate killing Hitler by introducing a lethal gas into the bunker's ventilation pipes. And every time I hear this mentioned, I shiver to think that at the start of December 1944, thanks to the good offices of Aunt Hilde, my stepmother's sister, who worked at the Ministry of Propaganda, my brother and I spent several days in that bunker as "special guests of the Führer."

A FEW SECONDS later my mother abruptly changes tack. She stares down poor Eva and returns to a subject that clearly obsesses her.

"How old are you, my dear?" And, hearing the response, she exclaims, "As old as that?" with evident disgust.

It's too much.

"Eva and I are the same age, you know that," I intervene with a certain severity.

She looks me up and down, disappointed, and her face grows dark. "It can't be. I don't want that. I can't have a daughter as old as that!" She glances down across her own body. "I'm still beautiful; I'm not decrepit in the slightest. How could I have a daughter who looks like an old bag?"

Fraulein Inge pulls her up short: "You mustn't be rude to your guests."

"I was just telling the truth," she replies, offended. "I was just saying what I thought. Is there some sort of a law against that?"

She throws the flowers to the floor.

"And I don't want those flowers! I'm not dead yet, and I don't want those flowers. They aren't even my favorites. I only like yellow roses."

She falls silent, with a sulky grimace, the teddy bear clutched tightly in her hand. And all of a sudden she asks me a question: "Do you like my clothes?" Caught unawares, I nod mechanically.

"Do you like the color?"

"Yes," I lie.

"It's the same color as my uniform," she announces. Then she leans toward me and whispers, "I sent it to the comrades. You know where, don't you?" She stares at me with an air of complicity.

I reply with what's supposed to be a noncommittal nod. I had seen my mother's SS uniform at her house in 1971. She had taken it out of the wardrobe with solemn nostalgia, asking me to try it on. I had refused.

"All my suits are that color," she continues, as if by way of small talk. "This one's the nicest."

Meanwhile Fräulein Inge has picked up the flowers and put them in a vase.

"Now," she says, "you'd be better off moving to the guest room, where you can talk to each other in peace."

My mother protests. "No, I don't want to go there. It's a nasty room, nasty and cold."

"It's neither nasty nor cold," replies Fräulein Inge, "and apart from anything else you always go there with your friend."

"I have no friends!"

"Isn't Frau Freihorst your friend?"

My mother makes a contemptuous gesture: "She's nothing."

"You shouldn't treat loyal friends like that," Fräulein Inge says disapprovingly.

"Pffff! I'm not going into that room because that's where I felt ill; I had a heart attack."

Fraulein Inge smiles indulgently. "You've never had a heart attack, thank the Lord."

"Of course I have. I nearly died."

I glance, puzzled, at Fräulein Inge, who explains, "She'd just stuffed herself with ice cream; it was indigestion."

"That's not true!" shrieks my mother, outraged.

"You mustn't tell lies," the Fräulein replies severely. "And that's enough of your nonsense now. I'm going to go with you to the guest room." Gripping my mother's wrist, she invites Eva and me to follow her.

The minute we're inside, my mother digs in her heels like a mule and scrutinizes me grimly. "What did you do with the teddy bear?" she asks.

WHEN FRAU FREIHORST had opened the door of my mother's apartment, my heart had skipped a beat. I had emerged from that place twenty-seven years previously, convinced that I would never set foot there again, and yet here I was, crossing that threshold once more.

We walked into the hall, then into the sitting room.

There was the table where my son had sat, five years old at the time, with his crayons and a coloring book that my mother had given him, together with a glass of milk and a pile of chocolate cookies arranged on a big plate with a decorated border.

The same furniture as before, and cloths draped over the white armchairs. The sight chilled me. I looked around with a combination of dismay and revulsion; and yet there was something obscurely familiar about the place. All of a sudden I had the feeling that I was suffocating. Frau Freihorst hurried to open a window. I breathed deeply and stood there for a moment to look down at the courtyard below.

It was a narrow Viennese courtyard, bare and unadorned. Nineteenth-century windows were set in the cracked walls, their sills decorated with sparse pots of evergreens.

An old man with long white hair, sitting on a tiled surface above the gas meters, was eating a sandwich wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, every now and again throwing crumbs to a group of sparrows.

"Are you all right?" asked Eva, beside me.

"I'm a bit thrown," I replied.

"Would you like to have a look at the bedroom?" I heard Frau Freihorst saying behind me. I nodded.

The minute I walked in I was struck by an atmosphere of icy solitude. I was chilled to the bone and felt as though I was violating someone's private property. Indeed, that was what I was doing: My mother would never know of this intrusion.

The room was orderly but neurotically so, with the kind of sterility that seems final and irrevocable. The head of the household had gone. The dust could take over again.

I looked around with a mixture of curiosity and unease. My mother's furniture, her things. The wardrobe in which she kept her SS uniform. There was a chest with three big drawers, a little inlaid dressing table, a broad bed with an immaculate chenille bedspread, and long curtains of fine fabric on both windows. A walnut bookcase held several volumes, including some highly respectable titles.

Frau Freihorst explained that my mother was an avid reader. "She even read in . . ." She broke off and blushed slightly.

I encouraged her with a slightly forced smile.

"She read in Birkenau," she went on with the embarrassment of someone who is giving voice to something that might sound paradoxical. And no one could say that reading in Birkenau wasn't a paradox.

I didn't want to investigate my mother's passion for reading any further. I turned my back on the bookcase, and my eye fell on a painting depicting a sunset over a lake. It was rather impressively done. Frau Freihorst explained, almost in the tone of a guide showing people around a museum: "Many years ago your mother invested in figurative art. She had around ten paintings that were worth a fair bit of money, but one day burglars got in and took the lot. This is the only picture she's bought since then. She couldn't resist the intensity of the light. She bought it and had it insured because it's by quite a well-known painter."

"So she didn't have financial problems," I murmured, almost distractedly.

Frau Freihorst hesitated for a moment, and then said, "I think you ought to know: Since she was released from prison, someone has been regularly paying sums of money into your mother's account."

"Do you know who it is?"

She shook her head. "No, I've never known; it was the only secret between myself and Traudi. But if you'd like information about your mother's finances, I know someone who—"

"No," I interrupted her, "I'm not interested, Frau Freihorst, really."

She lowered her head. "But all that she has . . ."

"No," I repeated, "let's forget it, please."

She nodded in resignation.

"Right," she concluded, spreading her arms. "I'm going back. I'll leave you alone for a moment." And she went to join Eva, who had remained in the sitting room.

It was in this room that my mother had slept for years ind years. Without ever stirring herself on my behalf. That thought allowed a doubt to slip into my mind: Had I per-laps failed in my role as a daughter? Wasn't it my duty to understand, to forgive? I repressed a curious impulse to the down on my mother's bed. Had I forgiven her?

To my great surprise, the answer was yes. I
had
'forgiven her the hurt she had done to us, to her husband, o her children. But as for all the other things she was guilty of, only her victims had the right to condemn or forgive.

Eva appeared in the doorway. "Are you coming?"

"Come in," I said.

She walked into the room, instinctively folding her arms over her chest as though to protect herself from an cy draft. Then she looked around, apparently at a loss.

"In the end, she's my aunt," she said with a certain bewilderment.

"That's right," I replied, "she's your aunt. I'd never thought of that."

"I'm curious to see her," she announced, as though speaking to herself. "I haven't seen her in a lifetime."

I had opened the window and the curtains billowed like sails.

"I feel so sad," I said.

Eva put an arm around my waist. "This room makes me sad, too. Come on, let's get back."

We left. I knew I had set foot in that room for the last time. My mother would never be going back there either.

FRAU FREIHORST WAS waiting for us in the sitting room, a true friend whom I doubt my mother really deserved.