By Blood (27 page)

My grandfather was a smart businessman, said Michal on the tape. He understood the firm was about to be “Aryanized”—stolen from us. So he and Dieter Gerstner, one of his plant managers, came up with a plan: I would marry Dieter’s son, Albrecht. I would convert. And the firm would be assigned to the Gerstner family, good Catholic Germans since the dawn of time.

I should say that I once loved Albrecht, in the romantic way, when we were in
Gymnasium
together. He was fair-haired, tall, athletic: a quite beautiful man in the Germanic sense, which was also my ideal. I truly believed that such a blond god of a man was superior to the dark Jews who lived in the Scheunenviertel district, who had been filtering in from the east, from Poland and Russia. They were uneducated,
poverty-stricken
. I was embarrassed by their horrid black hats, their ugly clothes, their poverty—yes, I was embarrassed to see the naked face of Judaism in those people.

Don’t be shocked. We all felt that way. We were, after all, the Rothmans, rich and cultured and fair-skinned. Look at my hair, my eyes. Many of us were like this. You could not tell us from the most Aryan of Germans. Even Hitler said so. Ha! So perhaps that is why I did not protest my grandfather’s plan too very strongly. Maybe that embarrassed part of myself, stupid girl that I was, welcomed it: my chance to
be
German, not German of Hebrew heritage, but simply a German German.

She laughed, sighed, called out for more tea and whiskey.

Then there came the sound of the coin slapped on the table.

The patient stopped the tape.

Gerda rattled dishes behind me, said the patient to Dr. Schussler. And I sat there, again seeing myself through the eyes of my birth mother—through the eyes of the woman who bore me. I was too Jewish! No wonder she gave me away. I nearly laughed out loud. I thought it was only my WASP mother who could feel this way.

If not for Gerda standing over me with a sweet smile, I think I would have run from the house and never returned. But events have a way of keeping you in rooms you wish to leave, don’t they? Just when you think you’ve had enough and are going to run away, right then normal life—teacups and creamers, two sugars or one—cement you in place. And you have no choice but to say please and thank you and just go on with what you hate, the life you’d like to abandon, the people who don’t love you and you’d like to leave.

I went ahead and took my tea. Michal took hers with a shot of whiskey, and then I turned on the recorder.

So I converted to Catholicism and married Albrecht, said Michal. The conversion was not at all taxing. By then the priests had had a great deal of practice converting Jews, and were all too happy to capture another soul about to marry into a Catholic family. I agreed to read three books. I learned four prayers in Latin. I was tested in a recitation of the Credo, which of course I already knew from all the great choral music of Mozart and Beethoven and so on. The priest prayed over me. I accepted the trinity of God, Jesus as God’s incarnation on earth, the holiness of the Virgin Mother. The sign of the cross was sketched above my head. A little sprinkle of holy water, and it was done. I was now Maria. And then I married and became Maria Gerstner, wife of Albrecht Gerstner.

(Ah! I thought. There you are, my little German Jewish convert. My elusive Maria G.)

Well, said Michal, sighing. Grandfather executed all the paperwork to assign the business to me and Albrecht and Albrecht’s father. Then my family packed up and left. My mother, father, sister, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, cousins—everyone went to Amsterdam.

There came the sound of tea being sipped, once, twice.

Weren’t you sad when they were all gone? the patient asked her mother. Terrified? Desperate?

There was a long pause, then:

Yes.

Michal clacked down her teacup.

Albrecht’s father, Dieter, had worked for my grandfather as a plant manager. He was not an educated man but a shrewd and ambitious one. At first he acted as if he were honored by my grandfather’s trust in him. Because, after all, it was all based on trust. Dieter, Albrecht, and I may have been the legal owners, but the understanding was that three-quarters of the profits were to go to Grandfather in the Netherlands, for further distribution to our exiled family. Look at it: The Gerstners received our magnificent house and one-quarter of our esteemed and very profitable firm, and for nothing, making them richer than they ever could have imagined in their dreams.

But Grandfather did not realize the hatred the Gerstners had nurtured over the years. And most of all, he underestimated the effects the Nazis were having on even the most moderate of anti-Semites. Dieter Gerstner, under all his pretenses of faithful service, was a nascent Jew hater who came to full bloom, shall we say, under National Socialism. He resented our family’s wealth. The wealth had been honorably earned.
Mein Gott
, Rothman Textiles made fabric for the Kaiser during the war of fourteen-eighteen! Nonetheless, as soon as my family was gone, that rat Gerstner began making comments about “Jewish theft” of Germany’s resources, about “Jewish cunning” and “Jewish pollution of the race.” Each time he would look at me accusingly, as if I had polluted
him
, despite the fact that
he
was the thief.

There came a long pause.

But I did not see all this from the outset. A strange kind of normalcy reigned in the household. Each Sunday, I covered my head with lace and knelt down before the great crucifix. I listened to the prayers intoned in Latin and the sermons thundered in German. I endured the incense. I took communion. I went to confession and lied.

After six months had gone by, Herr Gerstner proudly bought tickets for a performance at the Deutsches Opernhaus Berlin—the opera house.

By then all the Jewish players had been banished. And Goebbels, that puny propaganda minister, had forbidden the staging of any works by Jews. Most of the talented conductors refused to participate and left the country. But that traitor von Karajan stayed—he later went on to world renown, as if he had never collaborated, the hands that held the baton now cleansed. He was conducting that night, Mozart,
Die Zauberflöte
. Officials of the Reich marched in and filled the first row. As one, the audience stood, thrust out their arms, and roared:
Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

It was at that moment that I understood the life that lay ahead of me. There I was, standing in the balcony, my arm out, feebly, covertly resisting, I thought. My dear father-in-law watched me closely from the corner of his shrewd little eye, and I had to mouth the words and hum softly to add some sound:
Sieg heil!
Then I sat through the performance. In the end, I stood and applauded with everyone else.

So began my double life.

Then she called out: Gerda!
Mehr Tee!

Und
whiskey? asked Gerda.

Ja, mit
whiskey.

Again Gerda stood above us, said the patient after stopping the tape, that apple-cheeked young woman cheerfully bringing the teapot, the cups, the sugar, the creamer. Michal didn’t say anything, prolonging the rituals of sugar and cream and stirring, it seemed. Once she had a teacup cradled in her hands, she looked at me and went on:

I should tell you that Albrecht truly loved me. He was a kind and good man, and I could be myself only with him. He was very brave; he withstood the great danger that he would be declared a
Rassenschande
, a race defiler. He defended me against the barely disguised slurs from the extended Gerstner family. We both agreed we would just let them talk, not answer back. We decided I would behave like a good Catholic: go to church with a headscarf, kneel and cross myself. And like a good German, heartily shouting
Sieg heil!
when the occasion called for it.

She was silent for several seconds, drinking her tea, then said:

All right. Time goes by. I pretend to be Maria Gerstner, and my family is still thriving in Amsterdam. I don’t know if Dieter sent all the funds he was supposed to send, but whatever it was, it was evidently enough.

Then … then. May 10, 1940, Germany invades the Netherlands. Hitler bombs the hell out of Rotterdam and threatens to do the same to Amsterdam. The Dutch surrender in five days.

Now come the roundups, the letters from my parents, finally that strange, cheery postcard. We are settled in a lovely valley. Dieter stops sending funds to Amsterdam. I saw that he was happy about it. Now he owned it all, except for me. If only I did not exist. It was the thought I saw in his mind every time he looked at me: How can I get rid of this one last Jew?

Now comes another terrible year, 1941. The Nazis slowly begin “cleansing” Germany of its Jews. But the full force of Hitler’s death machine does not take aim at us immediately. Regulations strangle us. We cannot use public transportation. We cannot have certain professions, then we cannot work at all. Jews are wearing yellow stars. Not I—I was a convert, protected by my marriage to an Aryan. I walked the streets of Berlin and saw my former schoolmates, my old friends, their families, wearing the yellow star. And they looked at me.

The patient stopped the tape.

Michal said nothing more for a long while, the patient told Dr. Schussler. By the changes in her breathing, and the twitches of her eyes and mouth, I could tell she was remembering the scene. I could not imagine what she felt at that moment when she stood there, protected, and everyone she knew from her life as Margarette Rothman walked by wearing the yellow star. I hoped she would go on and characterize her feelings, but she was shut up tight.

The patient sat quietly for some seconds.

The hour is almost up, isn’t it? she said.

Almost. A few minutes more, said Dr. Schussler.

You’re a German, said the patient. How do you sit and listen to all this? What do you feel when you hear it?

Ah, that is not the point, said the doctor. The question is how you feel.

Right, said the patient. You’ll never tell me. But I’m not alone in the room, and knowing who I’m talking to is pertinent in this situation. I’m not asking, Did your mother love you? I’m asking how you, as a German, think about the events of the Holocaust.

(Yes! I thought. Demand to know!)

Dr. Schussler sat back and sighed before answering.

I am a human being, she said, and of course there will always be things in my patients’ lives that will evoke personal reactions. However, whatever my thoughts and feelings, my every concern is for your
well-being
.

(Liar!)

Can you see that? asked the therapist.

I suppose.

And whatever personal reactions I may have, the doctor continued, if they interfere with our work together—if—it is then my task to manage such issues. My task, not yours.

I see, said the patient flatly.

(She suspects, I thought. Good!)

All right, said the doctor. Let us resume on Monday night.

For five days, I looked forward to the confrontation between the patient and Dr. Schussler: She must learn her therapist’s bias! But then again I wondered: Could it be that the patient did not really wish to know the details of her therapist’s life? I thought back to my own therapies and remembered how, in many ways, I wanted the analyst or counselor or doctor to be little more than a blank wall. The therapist who insisted that we had a personal “relationship” was the one I detested most. So perhaps the patient, too, would be content to remain ignorant of the doctor’s private life.

These ruminations were interrupted by a letter.

It came through the mail slot in an odd fashion: alone, many seconds before the other mail, as if it had frightened away the advertising circulars. I saw the Gothic typeface in the return address. The silver seal above it. The motto:
Per Aspera Ad Astra
. I knew it at a glance: the university’s stationery.

It was a thin envelope. Only one sheet inside, it seemed. Therefore it could not contain a firing, because surely any such action would be accompanied by documents requiring signatures, including my own. (I laughed to myself as I considered how this reasoning was the opposite of that used by university applicants, who knew to be happy at the sight of a thick envelope, the sign of acceptance, and to feel dread at a thin one, the one-page letter of rejection.)

I put the unopened letter on the kitchen counter and could not bring myself to so much as touch it. The sight of the boy in the bar, now this letter: I felt that the university had begun to stalk me, had followed me to San Francisco, where I was a different person, I longed to think, a loving friend to the patient, a good man. As the days went by, I convinced myself that a thin envelope could indeed signal disaster, was perhaps a note saying, “You are fired. Paperwork to follow.” So I left it lying there amidst the embedded greasy remains of food whose preparation had preceded my tenancy in the cottage.

By Sunday night, I felt my resistance falling. The patient’s session was but one day away. I convinced myself that whatever the effect of the letter, I would be returned to health by the sound of my dear patient’s voice. I could pull her life over my head like a blanket covering (smothering, superceding, replacing) my own. Therefore I might open the letter and subject myself to whatever fate was contained therein.

It was late, nearing one in the morning. The traffic on the Great Highway was sparse; the ocean seemed tame, perhaps at ebb tide. My own breathing was the predominant sound in the house.

I went to the kitchen and opened the letter.

What kind of special torture was this? A committee that may—or may not—see fit to keep me informed. An investigation that may be completed within a semester—or an entire calendar year! What was the point of this letter except to remind me that I had been hung by the neck. And yet provided with a tiny footstool that might hold my weight for a time—then any moment be kicked away.

I paced throughout the night, realizing I had underestimated the potency of the letter, underestimated how much hope—in the very back of my being, before the patient, before anything that had happened in San Francisco—how much of my future depended upon the university. Oh, God! I called aloud. Oh, someone! Oh, something! Show me there is a reason for my life! I should have opened the letter late on Monday, I told myself, not on Sunday night; for now I had to endure an entire day before I might receive the medicine of the patient’s voice.

I closed the curtains. It was a gray day, and I managed to sleep. I awoke at five in the evening; ate a sandwich; went to the office and waited. She was all that could save me, I thought. She must distract me from whatever was (or was not) happening at the university.

And thanks to God (or to whomever, to whatever Providence might or might not exist in the universe), here she was finally, not confronting Dr. Schussler, not demanding to know the details of her doctor’s life, abandoning that battle as I had thought she might. Instead she resumed her story right where she had left off: in Michal’s little house, where she sat with her mother in the dining area that adjoined the kitchen, at the table that was too large for the space.

It seemed as though we had been sitting there for hours, said the patient to Dr. Schussler, although less than an hour had passed.