My Family for the War (42 page)

But I always wanted to remind myself that at least on that morning I could see something else too. I had lost Bekka, and Gary too, but they had left something behind for me. If I could manage to not let them die within me, to keep something of Bekka’s courage and Gary’s joy alive, then their lives hadn’t been extinguished, and there was nothing that couldn’t be overcome.

It was lunchtime when my mother called. Amanda was in the kitchen making something for us to eat, and she was the one who answered. I was already standing at the stairs when she answered the phone: “Shepard residence.”

There was a pause. That didn’t mean anything; any caller would first state their name and the reason for their call. But I felt it immediately. The absolute silence. The house stopped breathing; it was waiting for the magic word.

Amanda said very gently, “Margot?”

My foot hovered above the first step.

“Please stay on the line. Don’t hang up. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I always loved hearing Amanda speaking Yiddish, that warm, cheerful language, our language. A language like a bridge. “How good that you called, especially today. Your daughter is so sad. She had to hear that her friend Bekka died.”

The soft wood of the stair railing stroked the palm of my hand, and I felt the familiar little groove in the middle of the stairs.

“Do you remember that Bekka was supposed to come live with us? The war started just two days too soon.”

The last step. Amanda stood with her back to me and our eyes met in the mirror, locked.

“Now I can only give one child back to her mother,” Amanda said quietly to us both, and only then did I remember that she too had once made a promise.

She closed the kitchen door firmly behind herself after she had handed me the receiver. For the first time in more than six and a half years, I heard my mother’s voice.

“Ziska? My Ziskele! I’ve written almost thirty pages to you, and now I don’t dare send them.”

Chapter 24

Anyone who returns to their mother nearly grown up after last
seeing her as a ten-year-old shouldn’t count on a joyful reunion—even after talking on the phone every day for two weeks, when their voices have become more familiar to each other again. My stomach knotted as we saw the bright strip of the Dutch coast appear before us; I had remembered the crossing taking much longer. It was still hard to believe I was actually on my way, on my way back.

At the pier in Harwich Amanda had bought a round trip ticket, and only a one-way ticket for me.

“I don’t know if I’m still the kind of person a young girl should grow up with,” Mamu had objected timidly, who seemed to be much more scared of my return than I was.

“I’m already grown up, Mamu,” I reminded her.

“My goodness, I keep forgetting! That big British soldier who put me on the train, thank goodness Erik only told me that he was your fiancé afterward, otherwise I would have fallen over dead one step away from freedom.”

“Well, he isn’t really my fiancé, but you should get used to seeing Walter again soon. He’s stationed in Lübeck and will definitely come by often.”

“If you stay,” said Mamu, still unsure.

“If I stay,” I confirmed.

Uncle Erik’s concerns were more concrete. Was I aware that my mother wasn’t the same person, that she suffered from panic attacks, eating disorders, sleeplessness, and bouts of deep depression in which no one could help her, not even me? In contrast, I was the only one with a home, with plans and a future; Erik thought it might be stressful for Mamu to think of me giving all that up.

It took a while until he understood that Mamu also belonged to my life, that there couldn’t be any future, any plans, any home that didn’t include her as well. I wasn’t giving up anything, but gaining something.

Since I left Germany, I had been convinced that my mother could only have parted with me because I wasn’t especially important to her. While I knew that she saved my life by doing it, there had always been this little barb, even in my happiest moments: My mother had sent me away.

But now my second mother was sending me on a journey too—and everything was different. I didn’t doubt Amanda’s love; I knew what I meant to her and Matthew. They needed me; it must have been infinitely difficult for them, and yet they let me go. They parted with me for no other reason than that they hoped for my even greater happiness.

And so now, only now, I understood. It’s possible to let someone go
because
you love them
. Maybe it hadn’t been any different for Mamu. Maybe I would know soon. Amanda held tight to her hat, braced herself against the wind whipping
about the railings, and squinted her eyes straining to recognize the Continent, as she called it.

Before we left, Matthew said, “No matter what you decide, you’ll never be anything but my daughter to me.”

“I couldn’t go if I didn’t know that,” I replied.

The train ride from Hoek van Holland to Groningen was difficult. After the Germans had blocked transport of coal into Holland in the last winter of the war, people had torn up railroad ties and burned them out of desperation. There were still stretches that hadn’t been repaired, and we had arranged to meet Uncle Erik and Mamu in Rotterdam and then travel farther north together a few days later. My uncle had suggested a certain café that he knew was open as a meeting point.

As we walked the short stretch from the train station to our pension, I was appalled by the damage the war and hunger had left behind. Bombed-out ruins—still from the first summer of war—were certainly a familiar sight to me, but there wasn’t a single tree here, emaciated children stared at us, and fake cheeses and butter made of paper stood in the store windows. The people carrying their almost empty shopping baskets through the streets seemed gray and exhausted.

Amanda and I were dressed very modestly ourselves, our coats and skirts patched and mended so often that we had all gotten used to moving very carefully so as not to strain the fabric any more than necessary. But everything we had experienced with rationing in London paled in comparison to the misery that had obviously befallen the Dutch, and
when I addressed the woman in our pension in a friendly tone in German, I regretted it immediately. She glared at us with such hatred that Amanda and I were flooded with a long-forgotten, humiliating fear.

“We come from England. We’re Jewish,” I reassured her quickly, but the damage was done, and the distrustful woman didn’t respond to English or French.

“I won’t speak another word of German as long as I’m here!” I declared, shaken. “I’d rather they don’t understand my English than be stared at like that again!”

We unpacked our few belongings and stretched out on the bed. We had more than two hours until we were supposed to meet Mamu and Uncle Erik, and since we had left England very early in the morning, we were getting tired. But the mounting tension, and probably to some extent the thought that these were the last hours Amanda and I would have to ourselves, kept me awake. Neither of us spoke. We had said everything to each other that was important, and I kept my thoughts to myself: I’ll never experience such trust with another person. Something like this only happens once in a lifetime, if at all.

Uncle Erik proceeded very carefully. He had allowed two or three hours for our first encounter, then each of us should have time to go back to our lodgings and relax. The next morning we would meet again—“and then we’ll see how it goes.” I was glad for his caution. After all, he knew best how much my mother could handle.

The closer Amanda and I came to the designated meeting place, the more nervous I became. When I opened my
mouth to announce, “I think that’s the café ahead,” I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was flat and about an octave higher than usual.

“We’re too early,” I groaned when we had taken a seat at one of the three small tables on the cobblestones in front of the café. An older woman came out, looked at us curiously, and told us she had sheet cake, malt coffee, and tea. With some effort, we explained to her in English that we were waiting for two more people.

“Do you think they have bathrooms inside?” I asked shyly just as soon as the woman had left.

Amanda looked at me with alarm. “My goodness,” she said quietly. “Is it so awful? Soon you’ll have it behind you. Just a few minutes, love. The end of the journey.”

Tears welled in my eyes; I jumped up and stumbled inside the café, where two men sat with newspapers. The old woman approached me, a sweet, round, pale face. Was I all right? Could she bring me a glass of water? I looked at her through my tears and forgot all my resolutions, and said in German: “I’m waiting for my mother. We’re Jews. I haven’t seen her for almost seven years.”

For a moment there was such a silence in the room that I was afraid I’d ruined everything. They were about to kick me out. Terrified, I blinked away my tears… and found myself looking into friendly eyes.

“Why don’t you sit here, right by the window, then you can see her coming.”

She adjusted the chair for me, and through a gray windowpane I had a view of the square. There was a stone fountain, like our old meeting spot in Tail’s End. Heavens,
how should I even begin to tell my mother about my life?

A few pigeons landed next to Amanda’s table and pecked hopefully around her. She sat so still the birds hopped over her shoes.

What am I doing here?
I thought with a stab of conscience.
I have to go outside again, I can’t just leave her sitting there alone.

And then: Amanda’s smile, the quick jolt that went through her whole body. The pigeons flew away, there was a brief, annoying flurry of wings, and there she was.

Oh, my God. Is that Mamu?

I recognized her because she was on Uncle Erik’s arm: an older woman in a light coat, with overly dyed blue-black hair that made the face below it look even more sickly and pale. In spite of the mild weather she was clearly freezing, and her steps were so slow, as if she had lead weights on her feet. As they drew even closer, I saw that Mamu’s cheeks formed two little sacks that hung down limply.

A surge of wildly mixed feelings gripped me: pity, love, rage, helplessness. Horrified understanding of what the Nazis had done—my proud mother! She hadn’t been killed, but was destroyed nonetheless. Her life had been taken from her too. They had taken everything.

Everything?

No, there had to have been something that made her endure. Something must have moved her to gather her strength, to risk the trip to Rotterdam and come here. Something made her color her hair and re-create an old, familiar trait: the trademark strands of hair that hung in her eyes, giving her haggard face a peculiarly stubborn, courageous, and provocative
look. Something seemed to want to urge her to start over again.

No. Not
something
. Me.

Outside on the square, Amanda stood up and did the same thing she had done when we first met: She stretched out her hand and went toward Mamu, and in Mamu’s nervous face was suddenly reflected the warmth of this greeting, the smile of my other mother. Mamu’s hand still held in hers, Amanda turned around and pointed in my direction, said something, she and Uncle Erik laughed… and the loose ends of my life were woven together, Ziska and Frances, Mamu and Amanda, yesterday, today, soon.

I felt myself being pulled through the room toward the door.

“Is everything okay?” asked the woman in the café.

“Absolutely.” Then I stepped outside. “Everything is fine just the way it is.”

That would have been a good ending, I suppose.

The captain watched silently as the passengers helped each other on board. There were five—two couples and a little girl about three years old sporting a red life vest. They had found him through the owner of the pension in Ponta Delgada, as was often the case. The older of the two couples would be around fifty, a tall, serious man wearing a long coat and a hat, the woman slim and introverted with a delicate, attractive face and a warm smile.

The young woman was practically still a girl herself, not more than early twenties, and her partner—clearly the father of the little girl, who had inherited his brown curls and round cheeks—wore a uniform, but probably only for this occasion, because it was hard to overlook that it was already tight across the chest and stomach. One of Monty’s boys! The captain saluted when he recognized the insignia of the Eighth Army.