“Say what you will,” Karl had answered. “But you would lay down your life for that girl.”
He was a wise man. Maybe that came from being older. In his late fifties, he was more than a decade older than she was. His perceptiveness was one of the things Seema found intriguing about him. That was his job, of course, seeing through people and second-guessing their motivations. As a newspaperman, he loved a good story, no matter how mundane or bizarre. When there was a fire at the zoo, or an infant was born with all of its teeth in its mouth, Karl was the first one there, pencil and notebook in hand. But he was also known as an intrepid reporter, unafraid to ask the provocative questions. His most famous interview had been with the actress Marlene Dietrich right after the movie
Der blaue Engel
came out in 1930. In one scene, Dietrich, who played a lusty cabaret performer, leaned back on a barrel, lifted her right leg, and wrapped her hands around her knee, exposing her garter-belted stockings. Then she sang, “Falling in Love Again.” It was the most talked about scene in the film, and when Karl had asked, “Miss Dietrich, would it be fair to say that your beautiful legs are actually the star of this movie?” She answered, “Darling, the legs aren’t so beautiful, I just know what to do with them.” It made news from Berlin to Los Angeles.
That was the Karl who Seema had fallen in love with: funny, curious, charming. But lately he was different. More serious. Cautious even. On New Year’s Eve they went to see prima donna
Maria Mueller perform “Tannhauser” at the State Opera. Just before the intermission, Seema felt a draft on her shoulders and whispered to Karl, “All I’m wearing is this silk chemise. Not much underneath it. Mind if I borrow your jacket?” Karl kissed her neck and ran his hand down her back. “You certainly dressed lightly for a winter night,” he whispered. She blew softly in his ear before murmuring back, “I didn’t dress for a winter night, I dressed for a night with you.” Flushed with the thought of what they would do after the opera, Karl wrapped his jacket around her shoulders and said, “This should keep you warm until then.” During intermission, when he went to the men’s room, she reached into his pocket to borrow his handkerchief and found the oddest thing. It was a flyer with a picture of Hitler and, underneath, the words “Gentle Hitler.” It made Seema laugh. When Karl came back to his seat, she showed it to him and joked: “So is our esteemed leader now a contestant in the Miss Germany beauty pageant?”
Karl snatched the flyer from her hand, folded it carefully, and stuck it back in his coat pocket. “That’s not funny,” he said.
“But it is funny,” she insisted. “A short ugly man competing for Miss Germany? It’s very funny.”
Karl whispered in fragments. “It’s part of a national campaign. The German government. The Nobel Peace Prize.”
“The Nobel Peace Prize?” Seema said in a startled voice. “Hitler?”
“Shh,” urged Karl. “Do you want the whole theater to hear you? Yes, the handout is part of the Nazi effort to groom Hitler for the Nobel Prize.”
“Hitler and the Nobel Peace Prize,” said Seema in a low voice. “Now that is really funny.”
“Enough,” snapped Karl, as the lights dimmed and the orchestra began to warm up. “We’ll discuss this later.”
That night, when they got back to the hotel room, they seemed to have left the incident behind them. Karl was far more interested in what Seema wasn’t wearing under her chemise and had his hands about her body before the door to their room had even closed behind them. He cupped his hands underneath her dress and carried her to the bed. He was hard and started to put himself inside her. “Wait,” she cried and turned on her stomach, tucking her knees beneath her like a crouched animal. “Now.”
Karl and Seema were proud of the pleasure they could give each other, and short of inflicting real pain, there were few things they wouldn’t try or ask for. Their lovemaking nourished and surprised them, and within its life dwelled their secrets and trust.
When they were finished, Seema lay with her head on his belly. “Why were you such a grouch tonight?” she asked, stroking the hair on his chest.
“I wasn’t a grouch.”
“Well, you weren’t very nice.”
“Oh really. Judging from the sounds you were making five minutes ago, I’d say I was
very
nice.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean in the theater. About the flyer.”
“Seema,” he’d said, his voice turning serious, “there are some things even you can’t joke about.”
“I can joke about anything,” she’d said, tickling his stomach, trying to sound lighthearted.
“I know you can. And you do. But sometimes it’s not appropriate.”
“Oh Karl, even you must think this business about Hitler and the Nobel Prize is funny.”
“You know, Miss Wisenheimer, we need to talk. Being a Jewess is becoming risky business around here. I must ask if you’ve given any thought to going back to America?”
“Why on earth would I go back?” She folded her arms across her chest. “I am a German woman in love with a German man. There’s nothing for me in America. I’m staying right here.”
“Come now, don’t play naive with me. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Surely it’s occurred to you.”
“No, it really hasn’t. This is my home. I belong here. Why should I leave?”
“Because,” Karl said, sitting up in bed so abruptly it caused her head to drop onto the mattress. “This is not the place to be if your name is Seema Glass née Seema Grossman and you have a nose like yours. That’s why.”
She propped herself up on her elbows and stared up at him. “Are you trying to get rid of me? Is that what this is about?”
“Seema, don’t be an idiot. I know you hate politics and you do your best to ignore what’s going on. But look around you. Surely you notice all the Brownshirts in Berlin, the fact that Jewish stores are closing every day? I love you, but this is not a safe place for you. I can’t help you.”
Now it was Seema’s turn to sit upright. “Help me? I never asked you to help me with anything. I’m staying and that’s that.”
Karl looked at his watch. His startling blue eyes were hazy now and the gray pouches under his eyes sagged into his cheeks. “You are very headstrong and I am very weary. It’s well after three and I have to be back at the paper tomorrow afternoon. We’ll continue this conversation at another time.” He held open
an arm so she could lie next to him. “Come, let’s get some rest.” She curled up on her side and settled into the place just below his shoulder blade, which seemed to have been scooped out just for her. From there she could feel his heart beat.
In the rift between wakefulness and sleep, she’d become momentarily stranded on the paradox of their conversation. “You say I’m unsafe, yet right now I am safer than I have ever been.” She tried saying the words out loud, but sleep stole over her before she could.
When it became clear that Seema was not going to leave Germany, Karl finally dropped the subject. It wasn’t until the first warm day in early March that it entered their conversation again. They were sitting at a corner table in the café near his house, drinking cognac, and leaning into each other, their heads almost touching. Seema was telling Karl about a woman who had come into the store and demanded to see a bracelet that was so expensive that the store guard had to stand by as Seema showed it to her. Somewhere in the language of diamonds and platinum, Karl’s attention turned to the slip of the cross around her neck. He thought about how it fell onto one of her breasts when she slept and how sometimes, when they made love, it would dig into him like the nippy foot of a crab.
He smiled and would have liked to take her breast in his hand just then. Instead, he tugged gently on the cross as she continued on about carat weight and marquise cuts.
Then he interrupted her. “You ought to think about converting.”
She screwed up her face as if she couldn’t hear him. “Converting? To what?”
“You’d be a perfect Catholic.” He continued to play with her cross. “You already have the equipment.”
“Why would I convert from one religion I don’t believe in to another?” she asked, raising the cognac to her lips.
“Because it could save your goddamned life,” he said, jerking the cross so hard she dropped her glass, causing the drink to dribble down her chin and splash onto her yellow silk blouse.
“Oh no, we’re not going to talk about that again!” she said, using her napkin to dab up the mess. “Shit. This is a brand-new blouse.”
“Oh yes, we are going to talk about that again,” he said, his chin jutting forward.
When Karl got angry, his voice had the timbre of two knife blades rubbed together. Like a good reporter, he stayed focused on his subject for as long as he needed to, and by the end of that long liquory night, the combination wore Seema down.
“So I’ll convert,” she said finally. “It’s no big deal. And maybe then we could stop talking about it.”
“That’s my sweet shiksa frau,” he said, kissing her. “I promise from now on our exchanges will be nothing but scintillating.”
Karl made all the arrangements and got the appropriate papers signed. She never got the cognac stain out of her blouse. Instead, she kept it hanging in her closet as a souvenir. They called it her christening gown.
F
OUR WEEKS LATER,
on an early afternoon in April, Seema decided to take her lunch outside where the tulips and daffodils had lit up the exhibition grounds. On this day, when every tree bud held a promise and the air was sweet with spring, deciding which bench to settle on or whether to sit facing the sun was the most grueling demand Seema made on her imagination.
So she ignored the throng of people that swept past her. Midday shoppers, she assumed. But they moved so fast and made so much noise with their jeering and screaming. That and the bursts of guttural demands she could hear in the distance:
Mach schnell. Lauter singen!
Should she ignore the commotion and continue on to the exhibition grounds? There was something about those people: their rabid eyes, their contorted faces. They frightened her, yet she felt compelled to move with them. At first she walked, faster and faster until before she knew it, she, too, was running. She strained to catch her breath. Her heart drummed and a cold fear trickled through her. When they got to Lutherstrasse, she heard people singing the “Happy Birthday” song. Only it had no melody. It was being shouted in the imperative. The lyrics were different. She sorted them out.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday, happy birthday,
Happy birthday, dirty Jew.
Seema let herself get pushed forward until she saw them. Six men, middle-aged and older. She recognized one of them as a dentist who had come into Schweriner a few months ago to buy his wife an opal ring for her fiftieth birthday. The men wore conical party hats with ruffles around the bottom and elastic bands under their chins. She thought of how the dentist had told her that when his wife saw the way the light refracted off the ring in the window of Schweriner, she said it looked to her like a globe. The party hats were green and purple and had red pompoms on their pointy tops. They were too small for the men and were cocked in crazy angles on their heads. She remembered the dentist saying
that the ring was the perfect present for his wife because she was the world to him. The men held hands and danced in a circle while soldiers with guns stuck into their belts yelled at them to sing louder, dance faster. Seema put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut after one of the soldiers started shooting at their feet. Still, she could hear the other soldiers laughing. The dentist had told her that all three of his children were grown and lived in Kaiserslautern. The men were dancing and singing as fast and loud as they could. Two looked as if they might collapse. The other four clasped their hands tightly and nearly dragged them around the circle. There were more gunshots and there was more singing and then one body fell and then another and another and another and another and another until the men lay in the street, the party hats swimming in blood. Seema remembered the picture the dentist had shown her of his five grandchildren. The soldiers urged the crowd to go home. The show is over, one shouted, waving his gun. Then the soldiers dispersed, but not before a few of them bent over the fresh corpses, picking off their jewelry and searching their pockets for money.
Seema ran back to Schweriner and upstairs to the ladies room. She hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and had only a piece of bread and butter for breakfast, yet she threw up as if she’d been feasting all morning. Small pieces of yellow vomit fell onto her shoes and the floor, and all around her was the sour smell. Her skin was clammy, and she was shivering and felt as if her legs might give way. The inside of her mouth tasted bitter and she held onto the walls of the bathroom stall for support. She thought about the lady with the opal ring and the man who had given it to her and how she was the world to him. It made her want to retch again, but there was nothing left.
For the first time since she’d worked at Schweriner, Seema went home sick in the middle of the day. Frau Schultz saw her come through the door. “You look terrible,” she said, taking Seema’s arm. “You’re pale and shaky. Come, let’s get you to bed.” Seema let herself lean on the old woman’s arm. She studied Seema’s face “Oh my dear, you’re crying. What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” Seema lied, falling onto her bed. “I must have the grippe.” She would never tell Frau Schultz what she had seen. She would never tell anybody.
She lay in her bed thinking about Flora and Simon and how for so many years they’d been urging Edith to come to America. Maybe they were right. She thought about Margot and Frederick and what it would take to budge them from their home. Nothing would ever budge them. Nothing. And about Karl. Now there was a German through and through. He had no worries. He was a Christian, a newspaper reporter who loved his job. He’d never consider leaving Germany. And as long as Karl was here, this is where she would be. For the first time it occurred to her that she might put herself in harm’s way by staying, but never mind. Life without Karl was unthinkable. Better to live in jeopardy than to flee back to America. To what? To nothing.