children. If the boys mixed themselves up in a fistfight, and lost in the scuffle, they could not return home to complain. A busted-up lip or a black eye was proof enough of their defeat. And crying was prohibited. The women didn’t have to follow the same code of conduct, of course. But she loved her brothers and there was nothing in this world that would allow her to accept being treated differently. She was raised within those rules. So, there were no tears. Her father knew very well what he was saying.
He was old-fashioned, from Eastern Europe’s Galicia, still using rubber-soled peasant shoes. As a child, she remembered his footprints alongside the farm’s henhouse being as large as a buffalo’s. His voice during the Sabbath ceremony in the synagogue was just as deep as his footprints in the garden. About two hundred pounds of depth.
Hebrew is an ancient language that contains the solitude of ruins within, like a voice from the hillside calling out to you, or the song of the siren heard on a distant ship. The music of the Psalms still moves her. She notices a cramp in her back when she hears it in dreams, like now, as the train travels to the other side of the border, a type of tickling sensation just below her side. Perhaps that’s where the soul lives, she thought.
She never knew what the soul was. As a child, when they lived in Reutlingen, she believed that souls were the white diapers that her mother hung out to dry on the balcony. Oskar’s soul. Karl’s. Her own. But now she doesn’t believe in those things. The God of Abraham and the twelve tribes of Israel would break her neck if they could. She did not owe them anything. She preferred English poetry a million times over. One poem by Eliot can free you from evil, she thought; God didn’t even help me escape that Wächterstrasse prison.
It was true. She left by her own means, self-assured. Her captors must have thought that a blond girl, so young and so well-dressed, could not be a Communist. She thought it, too. Who would have known she would end up taking an interest in politics frequenting the tennis club in Waldau? A deep tan, white sweater, short pleated skirt … She liked the way exercise made her body feel, as well as dancing, wearing lipstick, donning a hat, using a cigarette holder, drinking champagne. Like Greta Garbo in The Saga of Gosta Berling.
Now the train had entered a tunnel, sounding a long whistle. It was completely dark. She breathed in a deep smell of railway emanating from the car.
She doesn’t know exactly when everything started to twist itself. It happened without her realizing it. It was because of the damn cinders. One day the streets started smelling like a railroad station. It reeked of smoke, of leather. Well-polished high boots, saddlery, brown shirts, belt buckles, military trappings … One Tuesday, as she was leaving the movie theater with her friend Ruth, she saw a group of young men in the Weissenhof district singing the Nazi hymn. The boys were just pups. They did not pay it further mind.
Later, it was prohibited to buy anything in Jewish stores. She remembered her mother being thrown out of a gentile store, bending over to pick up her scarf that had fallen in the doorway as a result of the shopkeeper’s push. That image was like a hematoma in her memory. A blue scarf speckled with snow. The burning of books and sheet music began around the same time. Afterward, the people began filling the arenas. Beautiful women, healthy men, honorable fathers with families. They weren’t fanatics, but normal people, aspirin vendors, housewives, students, even disciples of Heidegger. They all listened closely to the speeches, they weren’t being fooled. They knew what was happening. A choice had to be made and they chose. They chose it.
On March 18, at seven in the evening, she was detained by SA storm troopers at her parents’ home. It rained. They came looking for Oskar and Karl, but since they did not find them, they took her instead.
Broken locks, open armoires, emptied-out drawers, papers everywhere … During the search they found the last letter Georg had sent from Italy. According to them, it spewed Bolshevik garbage. What did they expect from a Russian? Georg was never able to talk about love without resorting to the class struggle. At least he had been able to flee and was out of danger. She told them the truth, that she had met him at the university. He studied medicine in Leipzig. They were sort of boyfriend and girlfriend, but they gave each other their own space. He never accompanied her to parties her friends invited her to and she never asked about his gatherings until dawn. “I was never interested in politics,” she told them. And she must have appeared convincing. One can suppose her attire helped. She wore the maroon skirt her aunt Terra had given her for graduation, high-heeled shoes, and a low-cut blouse, as if the SA had come to get her just as she was going out dancing. Her mother always said that dressing properly could save one’s life. She was right. Nobody placed a hand on her.
As they drove through the corridors toward her cell, she heard the shouting coming from interrogations taking place in the west wing. When it was her turn, she played her part well. An innocent young woman, and frightened. In reality, she was. But not enough to stop her from thinking. Sometimes, staying alive solely depends on keeping your head in place and your senses alert. They threatened to keep her in prison until Karl and Oskar turned themselves in, but she was able to persuade them that she really couldn’t supply them with any information. Choked voice, eyes wide-open, tender smile.
At night she stayed on her cot, silent, smoking, staring at the ceiling, her ego a bit bruised, wanting to end the whole charade once and for all. She thought about her brothers, praying that they’d been able to go underground, cross to Switzerland or Italy, like Georg. She also planned her escape for when she was able to get out of there. Germany was no longer her country. She wasn’t thinking of a temporary escape, but of starting a new life. All the languages she learned would have to come of some use. She had to find a way out. She’d do it. That she was sure of. This is why she had a star. The train came back out into the light again as the wagon clattered through the mountains. They had entered another landscape. A river, a farm surrounded by apple trees, hamlets with chimneys blowing smoke. Children playing on top of an embankment lifted their arms toward the edge of dusk, moving their hands from left to right as the train abandoned the last curve.
The first shooting star she saw was in Reutlingen, when she was five years old. They were walking back from their neighbor Jakob’s bakery with a poppy-seed cake and condensed milk for dinner. Karl was ahead, kicking rocks; she and Oskar always lagged behind, and so Karl, with his big-brother finger, pointed to the sky.
“Look, Little Trout.” He always called her that. “Make a wish.” Up there darkness was the color of prunes. Three little children, interlinking arms over shoulders, looking up at the sky, while they fell, two by two, three by three, like a handful of salt, those stars. Even now, when she remembers it, she can smell the wool from the sweater sleeves on her shoulders.
“Comets are a gift of good luck,” said Oskar.
“Like a birthday present?” she asked.
“Better. Because it’s forever.”
There are things that siblings just know, the kinds of details spies use to confirm identities. Memories that slither beneath the tall grass of childhood.
Karl was always the smartest of the three. He taught her how to behave if she were ever arrested and to use the secret codes of communication that the Young Communists used, like pounding out the letters to the alphabet through the walls. This, at least, helped earn her the respect of her fellow prisoners. In order to survive in prison, one must reinforce the mechanisms of mutual aid as much as possible. The more you know, the more you are worth. Oskar, on the other hand, explained to her how to build one’s inner strength for resistance. How to hide weakness, act with the utmost assurance, self-confidence. So that your emotions don’t betray you. One can smell fear, he’d tell her. You have to see it coming.
She looked around with suspicion. There was a passenger in her compartment, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was dressed in black. In order to let some air into the compartment, he
