By Blood (28 page)

Michal was telling me about her friends who now wore the yellow star, the patient went on. About having to walk right by them. She was afraid to associate with them. Her father-in-law watched her constantly, she said. He never said it exactly, but the implied threat was that if she did not behave herself, if she brought even a whiff of Jewishness into the family, he would somehow force Albrecht to divorce her, and then she would be on the next train to Auschwitz.

Some of her old friends and acquaintances tried to go underground. U-boats, they were called, after the submarines. They tried to disappear, blend into the woodwork, pass as regular Germans, helped out by sympathetic non-Jews. She was terrified when she ran into one of her friends who was not wearing a star—terrified that her recognizing them would give them away. Because everyone knew she was an ex-Jew, and her knowing them would be suspicious.

The patient clicked the recorder on and off, on and off, cueing the tape. When it played again, we heard Michal saying:

Slowly they all disappeared. All the old friends and acquaintances, with and without the yellow stars.

Then came a long pause.

And as all this was happening, Michal continued, I just went about my life as Frau Gerstner. Frau Maria Gerstner.

Dieter Gerstner barely let me leave the house, she continued. I should describe him. A very undistinguished-looking man. Short and stocky, with a pockmarked face under a brush of thick, light-brown hair. He was not an Aryan god of a man. Albrecht got his good looks from his mother, Swanhilde, who was beautiful but a meek, weak person who ceded to her husband in all things. Dieter was a brute. One day he walked into my private dressing room unannounced, without knocking, stood looking me up and down, and said: Beware, my son’s fake little wife. The race laws are changing, and you are not as well off as you think you are.

What relish he took in reporting this.

Until then, being married to an Aryan was enough to make me
privilegiert
, to give me privileged status. But now the most privileged Jewish women were those who had children with their Aryan husbands. It was not enough just to be married; you had to have a child.

That night, Albrecht and I decided I would become “pregnant.” We didn’t want a child. We agreed we didn’t want to bring children into the world as it was, and we were very careful in our sexual activities. But we had to pretend I was pregnant. And then I would have a “miscarriage.” If necessary, I would get “pregnant” again.

So began our subterfuge.

My father-in-law had filled the house with spies. He wanted to be sure I was not secretly being a Jew—as I explained, for fear of losing the company. So the servants watched me constantly. I had to hide all evidence of menstruation from the maids. I had to be careful not to stain the sheets. Albrecht carried out my bloody cottons hidden in his briefcase. After three “dry” months, we announced I was having a child. One of my old school friends was a doctor. I told the family he was my physician, and luckily for us, he did not live close by and was not part of the Gerstners’ circle.

The Gerstner family threw a big party for us, which was exactly what Albrecht and I had hoped for. All Dieter’s friends in the Party now believed I carried the child of an Aryan. So I was golden! Nothing could touch me now.

I had to begin “showing,” so I bought a girdle that was too large for me and filled it with stuffing. I was terrified that Marta, the housemaid, would find it. She afforded me no privacy. She went through my closet, my drawers. I still believe she stole my mother’s cameo. She wanted to come and help me dress, help me in the bath, and it took all my conniving to keep her from seeing my naked body.

Albrecht and I then determined it was time I had a miscarriage. We waited for my next menstrual period, and I purposely stained the sheets. It was quite a scene as I held the bloody sheets up to Marta and cried over the lost child. I really did manage to cry. It was not hard to find in myself great sadness and desolation.

This meant, of course, that I was now childless, and vulnerable, so Albrecht and I made quite a deal of the fact that we would try for another child immediately, as soon as it was medically safe for me. I had to present myself as an Aryan vessel-in-waiting, a walking womb about to be filled any day with a good German child. My father-in-law’s dear friends in the Party began making jokes about when I would become pregnant again—didn’t I know it was my responsibility to the race?

So I soon became “pregnant” again. My whole life was subsumed by this subterfuge. And poor Albrecht, there he was carrying off my bloody cottons, my stained underwear, in his briefcase, finding ever more clever excuses to take a ride in the country, where he could bury the evidence.

There was a pause, then a command in a cold voice:

Turn off that machine.

She called for Gerda to come help her, the patient told Dr. Schussler. She wanted to stand, move around, take a walk, she said. Gerda came and, with Michal leaning on the girl’s arm, they walked toward the front door, then out into the courtyard.

The sound quality was poor on the next part of the tape. One could hear the cries of children, a faint rumble that might have been passing trucks, but mostly one heard the wind rushing across the microphone.

Albrecht had been my hero, Michal began. My rock, my only true companion. The only person on earth with whom I could express my feelings and my fears. And of course we were bonded by the drama of my “pregnancies,” my supposed desperation to be what a good German woman should be: a mother.

The wind lashed at the microphone. What she said was not clear, until she said the word “sick.” Then:

Pneumonia. In those days it was not like now, where you take some pills, go to bed for a few days, recover. Albrecht’s lungs had never been strong to begin with; he had suffered from asthma as a child, and was always a little wheezy.

Again the wind overcame her words. What one heard next was:

… to the car. Fainted in the street. It was the fever, you see. He was running a high fever, although he told no one. I heard Marta cry out, and I looked out the window to see Albrecht sprawled out on the pavement. Next to him was his briefcase. And I remembered: He was carrying away my bloody underwear and rags! Marta ran out the door, and I had to race behind her, not only because I was afraid for Albrecht, but also to get that briefcase before Marta could put her hands on it.

She paused. The shouts of children rose in the background, the
boink
of a ball bouncing.

Finally she said, I had to go to the briefcase before I could go to my husband.

Another pause.

Which I did. And then I nursed him, as best I could. He was all to me; I was in terror of losing him. Gerda,
bitte
…

And the wind took away the rest of the sentence.

The patient stopped the tape.

Gerda helped Michal take a turn around the courtyard, said the patient. When Michal sat down again, I asked her what happened next.

He died, she said. Just like that she said it, very flat: He died.

Then she said nothing for a long while, just sat there, vaguely looking at the children, as if her thoughts were far away.

I asked her to go on.

And she said, On? What else is there to do but to go on?

She laughed.

Here is the part where I am caught.

It was Albrecht’s funeral, said Michal as the tape resumed. There were very few of us at the graveside, just the immediate family, a few cousins, a friend or two of the Gerstners.

I felt lost, desperate, was sobbing, having only Albrecht’s mother, Swanhilde, for support, otherwise I really would have fallen into the grave with him.

Suddenly Swanhilde tightened her arms around me. I followed her gaze to the edge of the graveside circle. Two men—Gestapo. With them was a woman, her arm linked with one of the men, hanging on him like a gang moll. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, but you could see a swirl of gold hair peeking out. And her eyes: just visible below the brim of her hat. The eyes.

I knew at once who she was; we all knew who she was: Stella Goldschlag, “the blond poison,” notorious traitor. A Jew. She was a “catcher”: she hunted down other Jews for the Gestapo. They promised, if she cooperated, that her parents wouldn’t go to Auschwitz. Ha! Later her parents were taken anyway.

And staring at me: those terrible hunter’s eyes.

I nearly fell. I grabbed on more tightly to Albrecht’s startled mother. I watched as Stella pointed me out to one of the men. And he came toward me. Marching. I couldn’t believe it: Were they going to take me away directly from a burial? Were they that callous? Of course they were, I answered myself.

The Gestapo officer grabbed my arm and said, Come with me.

Then Frau Gerstner said, What are you doing?

It was not like her; she was usually so meek; but even she could not believe what was happening. And she said again, What are you doing?

The officer said that I was no longer
privilegiert
. With Albrecht dead, I was now just a Jew like any other. A Jew by blood. And Swanhilde, suddenly brave, answered him back by saying: But she is carrying my son’s child! She is pregnant with a good German child!

I nearly fainted. Oh, God. A child.

Michal stopped speaking; the wind rushed into the pause; there came the sound of something tapping, perhaps Michal’s cane against stone. After some seconds, she resumed, her voice lowered, flat, drained.

I got away that day, she said. But now I had to keep the subterfuge going. But how long could I do it? I was already supposed to be four months pregnant. I would have to begin to “show” again. I had managed to keep my girdle, but the stuffing had been thrown away, and now I had to smuggle in some stuff, bit by bit, in a handbag. Without Albrecht, I had to find a way to dispose of my menstrual pads, again in my handbag, which became stained one day, a stain I had to explain to Marta as a cut on my hand. But there was no cut.

It was inevitable. My spirit had already surrendered. One day, while I was in the bath, Marta broke in—broke the flimsy lock on the door. She saw the girdle, the stuffing. She reported me to the Gerstners.

I must tell you this scene, she went on. We are in the great drawing room in which my mother once held her salons. Dieter calls me in. Frau Gerstner is there, Marta is there, and her husband, Hans. Dieter says, You cur! You liar! There never were any pregnancies, were there?

It must have been all arranged, because right then the officers were ushered in, and I was taken away.

There was a long pause. On the tape, the patient then asked, Where did you go?

I was taken to Theresienstadt, then to a labor camp in Poland.

There was another long pause.

And what happened to you there? the patient asked.

I told you, said Michal. We would not discuss this part. Nothing happened to
me
. It was nothing about me, personally, as a human being. The point was to humiliate us and take away our personhood. What happened to me is what happened to everyone.

But you survived, said the patient. I think it’s … heroic.

Michal laughed.

Heroic! That is ridiculous. All I had to do was convert and have my husband protect me for years, while the Jews of Berlin slowly disappeared. If he had died a year earlier, I would be another rotting piece of flesh in some mound in Poland. Heroism! Living through that time had nothing to do with my heroism. The heroism was all my dear Albrecht’s. He endured the taunts of his family. He defied the race laws. He kept me alive.

The tape whined on, as if empty. The patient clicked off the machine.

She made me stop taping, she said to Dr. Schussler. Gerda helped her up, and they started back to the house. At the doorway, Michal turned and said to me, Come back tomorrow, and I will get to the part where you come in. After the war. To Belsen.

To Belsen, to Belsen. The words rattled in my thoughts in the rhythm of a rushing train. I was the one who had gotten us here, on that train hurrying to the site of the patient’s birth. And what awaited us?

I did not fall asleep until the sky was brightening; I awoke past three o’clock in the afternoon. I am not certain why, but I switched on the battered radio my landlord had left me, something I rarely did, since, as I have said, its defective tuner drifted along the dial. I must have wanted to hear a sound, any sound, to vanquish the words that had installed themselves in my mind.
To Belsen, to Belsen
. Through the static came bits of traffic reports, sports scores, commercial advertisements, weather forecasts; when suddenly there came the jangle of a fake teletype, then a man’s excited voice shouting:

Bulletin! Bulletin! Patty Hearst captured!

After which the voice, the fake teletype, the news reports, the ads, all drifted off into the static storm.

I tried to retune the station but succeeded well enough only to hear “fugitive heiress,” “FBI,” and “house in the Outer Mission.” I rushed out to a nearby electronics store, where televisions normally were tuned to each of the five stations received in the area. All the channels had interrupted their normal programming, their announcers excitedly reporting the story.

The newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who had been dragged screaming from her Berkeley apartment some seventeen months ago by a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army—its motto “Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People”—who apparently had joined forces with her captors, taking for herself the nom de guerre Tania, banding with them in a bank robbery and murder (appearing on security cameras sporting an assault rifle and looking rather jaunty in a beret)—the fugitive Patty Hearst had been captured by the FBI.

A month earlier, there had been a shootout in Los Angeles between the police and six members of the SLA, and all six group members had been killed, either by bullets or as a result of a fire that had been started by police tear-gas canisters. Patty Hearst’s reaction at the time was to send a tape saying that the “fascist pig media” had painted a distorted picture of her “beautiful brothers and sisters.” Now, however, when the FBI came for her, she walked out quietly, saying, “Don’t shoot. I’ll go with you.”

The late edition of the
San Francisco Examiner
(her father’s newspaper) reported that Patty, upon leaving her arraignment, raised her handcuffed hands in the black-power salute. Her hair was died a brassy red. In an AP photograph taken through a car window, the top half of her face is obscured behind large, tinted aviator glasses. But her mouth dares you. The lips are drawn back to form a perfect triangle; the lines of her even white teeth exposed, upper and lower—a shark’s smile, a mouth you would not want to see swimming toward you out of the depths.

The story of Patty Hearst had fascinated me—it was one of the few news events I had followed while in San Francisco. How could I not? How did this heiress to the Hearst fortune, granddaughter of the legendary scoundrel William Randolph Hearst, she who was set up for a life in high society—how did she go from kidnap victim to the rifle-wielding “Tania”?

And how had the transformation been achieved within fifty-nine days? For that was the mere slip of time between her capture and her first communiqué saying she had joined forces with her captors. Was a person so malleable? Could sweet Patty, engaged to a wispy man with the unfortunate name of Steven Weed, be swept away so easily, so quickly?

Or was Patty Hearst one of us, her fate already inscribed within her, an inheritance from her notorious grandfather. Perhaps that shark’s smile was always there, merely waiting for a salty sea.