when we put him on the train at the Gare de l’Est, a few friends and I.
In February, I followed him, leaving gray Paris for Stuttgart, where the air was clear, dry, cold, and invigorating, where big people looked strong and healthy and I, at once, became ill.
VIII
I didn’t stay long in Abel’s dismal little room. On the third day, as happens only in happy stories, a handsome couple appeared and whisked me away to their beautiful dwelling. Soon I was lying in bed in a lovely sunny room. An intriguing young woman attended to my needs. Slim in a high-necked embroidered blouse of the same blue as her eyes and black satin slacks, she moved like a dancer while her face kept the serenity of a nun’s. Her name was Christine.
Christine and I communicated, with some difficulty, in her scanty French and my scantier German. Her greetings, which Abel translated, had confused me. I would never forget them.
“Congratulations! It is indeed appropriate to get sick when taking the first step on German soil.”
Christine took me to her doctor, Dr. Müller, a short, small man with a square head and a knowing, forgiving smile.
“Acids, acids,” Dr. Müller diagnosed.
He prescribed a strong solution of sodium bicarbonate (two pints of it daily), herb teas, enemas, and, most important, Hunger Kur, a draconian diet of strained mush, a bit of yogurt or grapefruit every third day.
Christine was taking notes. Suddenly she got into an argument with the doctor about Hitler and Czechoslovakia, I understood. Christine’s voice rose, sarcastic and angry. Dr. Müller, a man who knew that he knew best, remained calm and smiling.
“Because he made a vegetarian out of Hitler ten years ago, Dr. Müller thinks Hitler can do no wrong,” Christine scoffed as we left. “An ass in politics, but a good doctor. He will cure you.”
Which did not happen as fast as expected. For weeks, I remained extremely weak, plagued by pains in the abdomen and nightmares that made me scream in my sleep. And daydreams. Always the same ones: I was going back to Paris. A friend had told me before I departed, “Come back to us if you don’t like it. Don’t feel stupidly ashamed.” I wanted to go back. Something was telling me to go back. But I could not leave Abel.
In the end, Dr. Müller’s Hunger Kur worked, or perhaps it was Christine’s smiling and often unsmiling ministrations, or the feeling that I had been long enough a guest-patient in Christine’s restless household. It included the husband, a businessman, middle-aged, good-looking, well dressed, and a bit vain, who prudently took off his party badge before stepping over the threshold of his home, a maid, who proudly displayed hers pinned onto her snow-white uniform, and pugnacious Christine, who never missed an opportunity to heap sarcasm over every one of the party’s actions.
Abel visited often and stayed for dinner. Christine treated him kindly and openly showed that she felt sorry for him. She would not explain why.
During my illness, Abel’s family had searched and finally found an apartment for us. Not wanting the regular cumbersome furniture available, Abel had a few pieces made to order. “And no chair,” he declared. “A chair is for those who want to settle down.” No chair. He would sit on a crate. He ordered a drawing table, two sofa beds, a small square table with a corner bench, and two tiny cabinets.
Abel’s mother shook her head, smiled, and told me Abel had always been a bit of an eccentric. Christine helped me pick out a few cheap kitchen utensils.
In April, we moved to our pleasant but sparsely furnished three-room apartment. Located on the top floor of a three-story house in the hilly suburbs where neat, solid houses were surrounded by gardens, orchards, and tiny vineyards, it had a fine view of the city in the valley below.
Everything was well organized and practical. There was a laundry room in the basement. The tenants took turns using it. They also stoked the coal furnace in winter and cared for their share of the English garden that surrounded the house.
Six months of life in Germany was not going to be the ordeal I had imagined. Why had I been so fearful? Good order, I told myself, was a protection.
And now family, position, society demanded that Abel and I get married. Yes. Yes, we had intended to; more practical for traveling.
We got angry and upset right away: a new law required proof that our forebears had been non-Jewish for four generations. What kind of nonsense was that? But we submitted. My father and grandmother procured baptism certificates from parish priests. Abel got his own certification. And one gray morning in May, we walked down to City Hall. I did not wear the white suit and elegant hat made in Paris but a plain black suit and a hat I had concocted out of two old ones.
We met our witnesses at City Hall’s door, Abel’s older brother and the friend who had persuaded him to return to the Motherland.
We stood in front of a high, narrow desk draped in the Nazi flag. I listened to words I did not understand, spoken by a man I could not see, said “Ja” at the right moment, probably. Abel was ceremoniously given a thick black book, Mein Kampf, and we were done.
Wedding, Stuttgart, May 23, 1939
We invited our witnesses for a glass of white wine in a nearby restaurant. We were served white radishes with the wine, I remember.
The festivities were over.
IX
“Yugoslavia,” Abel said. “We could afford a short trip to Yugoslavia. We need fresh air.”
I was ready to go.
We inquired about visas, passports, and were handed forms to fill out.
This was when I discovered that I had acquired German nationality. I don’t know why I had not thought of that before. The next day, I rushed alone and in alarm to the French consul.
“If you did not declare before me, on the day of your marriage, that you wished to abandon your nationality, according to French law, you are still French,” the consul said.
“I want to make a declaration that I wish to keep my French nationality,” I said.
The consul smiled but registered my signed declaration and made out a passport in my married name.
“I must warn you,” he said, “you might find yourself unable to cross the German-French border with your two passports. I cannot put a visa on your German passport that I do not recognize, you understand, and the Germans won’t put a visa on your French passport that they do not recognize.”
I did not tell him, but I was not worried. A few years back, in Fascist Rome, I had been able to convince a high official of my innocence when it had been discovered that I had overstayed my visa by six months. The bored employees I had seen at the French-German border could not be that difficult to deal with.
We left for Yugoslavia in June. At first the lushness and fertility of the countryside surprised us. We had expected the aridity of Greece and southern Italy.
We rushed like
