Let Me Go (12 page)

She straightened up abruptly and hissed, "What are you doing? Pulling your mother's hair? You're still exactly the same as you always were, rebellious and naughty! You deserve to be punished."

But she didn't punish me. She clutched her suitcase and, turning around, said with one finger raised, "And when I walk through that door, you're not to go wailing and waking up your brother, you understand? You promise?"

So many promises in such a short time. I stared at her blankly and shrugged my shoulders.

"That's better." She turned around.
"So, auf Wiedersehen,
meine Kleine."

I didn't reply. My mother shut the door behind her. I wasn't to see her again for thirty years.

I stood there as though paralyzed for a few minutes. Just my heart was beating loudly. I ran to the room where Peter was sleeping.

He was perfectly peaceful, his angelic little face ringed by the blond curls that I had always envied him.

I stopped for a moment and looked at him and was seized by boundless sadness: I burst into uncontrollable floods of tears. My violent sobs woke him up. He opened his eyes, and when he realized that I was crying, he started howling at the top of his voice, standing up, gripping the edge of his cot. I hugged him. He was shivering. We held each other in a convulsive embrace for a while, then I got my breath back, extricated myself from him, and pulled him out of his cot. He needed to be changed. I tried to carry him to the bathroom, but he vigorously objected. He wanted his mother; she was the only one who ever changed him.

I managed to change Peter but with considerable difficulty. He had scratched me all over. I felt exhausted, snapped at him that he was naughty, and went into the kitchen. I took a chair, put it by the window, lifted the roll of cardboard, and peeped out.

Darkness had fallen; the air was damp and pungent. The few cars driving along Nordendstrasse had their headlights covered. All the windows of the buildings opposite were black and blind.

My brother was yelling furiously in the bathroom, calling endlessly for his mother in a voice that was by turns imploring and imperious.

He finally came into the kitchen, his eyes bright with tears and rage. He stared at me uncertainly for a few moments, then he started to kick the dresser, accompanying each blow with a raging cry of
"Mutti!"
I watched his fury with impotence and frustration.

"Stop it!" I tried to tell him once or twice, but he became even angrier. Leave it. He'll get tired on his own, I thought, and go back to sleep. I couldn't wait.

After a while someone rang at the door. I heard shouts outside. "What's happening? There's a blackout—why is your window wide open?"

I recognized our neighbor's voice and went and opened the door. She looked at me in confusion.

"What's going on, Helga?"

"My mother's gone," I replied, starting to cry again.

"What do you mean, she's gone?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

She shook her head in disbelief. She came into the house and immediately closed the window and the blackout.

"What on earth got into you, opening the window like that? Don't you know you could be reported?" she yelled at me. Then she leaned over me. "Where's your mother, Helga? No lies, now."

"She went away," I repeated in dismay.

She was still staring at me, but now her face wore a different, strange expression.

"What did she tell you when she went away?" she asked gently. She was quite young, and her hair was braided around her head.

"She told me to be good. She had a suitcase and she went away. She said that Aunt Margarete was going to come and get us."

"Ah, Aunt Margarete," the woman echoed, still with that baffled, intent look on her face. She smiled faintly, as though to reassure me, then picked up my brother, who was by now a little calmer.

A few minutes later Aunt Margarete turned up. Our neighbor went over to her, worried and anxious.

"Helga says her mother's gone away. What's going on?"

Aunt Margarete confirmed that this was the case. "Unfortunately it's true," she replied curtly. She hurried to pack our things and took us with her to her villa in Tempelhof. Aunt Margarete was rich. Her husband, a count, was away at the war, but the villa, which was frequented by the best of Berlin's high society, lacked nothing. There was always some delicacy on the table, while outside the ordinary people were starving to death. Our cousin Eva called Peter and me "poor people" and wouldn't let us touch her toys.

After some time, having been informed of our aunt's situation, my grandmother arrived from Poland and immediately decided to take us away. "I don't want my grandchildren to grow up here with you," she told her daughter bluntly. "You would ruin them; you'd turn them into little snobs with a bad smell under their noses." Long and bitter discussions followed, but my grandmother won in the end and set up house with us in the flat in Niederschönhausen.

And there we stayed until less than a year later my father got married again, this time to Ursula, the young woman from Berlin. And that was when I first found myself in hell.

THERE HAS BEEN A LONG silence. I am aware once again of the mounting tension as the time approaches to say goodbye. It's inexplicable, incongruous. Haven't I managed without my mother for my whole life?

I tear my gaze away from the window and meet her eyes.

"What are you thinking about?" This time she speaks in the tone of a worried, solicitous mother.

The last two hours have made me suspicious. I have learned how to avoid being wrong-footed as she dodges and dives from one position to another.

"What are you thinking about,
Mausi?"
That nickname from long ago touches a very vulnerable part of my soul, but she goes on. She puts her scrawny index finger to my cheek and asks in an almost caressing voice: "Come and give your old
Mutti
a kiss."

My stomach leaps into my throat.

I get up and kiss her.

She seems genuinely moved and wipes away a tear.

"Did your second mother kiss you?" she asks all of a sudden.

"No," I answer simply.

"Never?"

I shake my head. "No, never."

Now she is growing agitated, almost sobbing. "You should have stayed with Stefan's mother. Not that she was nice to me; she was a bad mother-in-law. But you might have been better off with her than with that . . . that . . . " She twists her mouth. "It was all Hilde's fault," she concludes resentfully.

She gets up and goes over to the window. It's stopped raining, but the sky is still dark.

"Hilde, Hilde!" she explodes and beats a feeble fist against the glass.

"If only a bomb had fallen on her head!" she groans. "Then she could never have gone to the gallery and bought 'Lions in the Savannah'!"

She sits back down in her armchair, and when she lifts her eyes to me, I see that she is eaten up with malign curiosity.

"What happened to her in the end?" she asks. She really is obsessed with that woman.

"Who?" I ask in turn, to gain some time.

"Hilde. Did she ever get married?" She is very alert now, desperate to know.

"No," I reply. "After we were repatriated to Austria, Hilde followed us, or rather she followed her sister to settle down somewhere nearby."

"Did she work?"

"She set up a little farm."

She explodes with laughter.

"So it's true, then, a bad penny always turns up again!"

I don't tell her that Hilde has been dead for many years now. I don't feel like it.

She thinks for a moment. "Certainly, she was efficient. That was why she worked with Goebbels. Anyone inefficient wouldn't have lasted two minutes with him. And anyway, he himself was a monster of efficiency. That man was a genius."

She seems to grow distracted and glances at her empty glass.

"I want another apple juice," she announces. "Call Fräulein Inge." But I'm not going to have the last few minutes of our conversation wasted like that. I throw her some bait. "I saw Goebbels once."

"Really?" She bites straightaway. "When?"

I think. "It was . . . well, Papa had married . . ."

She cuts in. "Spare me the details."

That bizarre jealousy again. After fifty-seven years.

She sulks for a few minutes before her curiosity overcomes her.

"You really saw him? Where?"

"At the Propaganda Ministry on Wilhelmsplatz. I remember lots of banners flapping about on all the buildings."

"And what else?"

"Hilde took us to his office. It was a big office, filled with light. He struck me as tall and severe—"

"But Goebbels wasn't tall," she objects.

"Yes, but I was a child and had to raise my eyes to look him in the face. He was serious. He barely glanced at me and immediately turned to Peter. He reached out a hand as though to stroke him, but Peter turned his face away. Only then did he give a half-smile. And he didn't deign to take a closer look at me until Hilde told him my name was Helga, like his elder daughter."

My mother quickly runs her tongue over her lips, an automatic reaction that you often see in old people. Every time she does it I can't help feeling a twinge of nausea, of disgust.

"And what happened after that?" she persists. It is as if she is waiting to hear the epilogue to a fairy tale.

"My—" I break off. Better not to mention my stepmother again. "At the end we were given some coupons for extra food rations."

"And Goebbels didn't say anything else to you?"

"I can't remember. The grown-ups talked. Oh, yes, I remember they called him to the phone, and we left without being able to say good-bye properly." It's not true. The story about the phone call is pure invention.

"And what about the coupons?"

"Ursula got them from a clerk. A tiny little clerk, I remember. A serious little thing who called Hilde 'Fraulein' rather deferentially."

"And what else?"

"That's all. We went away. Hilde stayed because office hours weren't over yet. We got home just in time to run to the shelter. Alarms were going off on the corner of Friedrichsruherstrasse."

The light in her eyes goes out, and suddenly there's an infinite distance between us once again. It takes as little as that for her to be drawn back into the "old days."

She murmurs to herself, "Goebbels was a genius, but I didn't like him as a man. Hilde, on the other hand, was wild about him. I've always been convinced that she was secretly in love with him." Another of her obsessions, clearly. Her eye runs over me without seeing me, lost in the past.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WAR, in Berlin, my brother and I were explicitly forbidden to mention Hitler or Goebbels. "From now on you have to look ahead," they said, "the past is past, and the future begins here."

But what future? I can still clearly see the Berlin of'45. We children played among the rubble while the adults, utterly exhausted, almost guided by animal instinct, did their best to supply us with our daily needs: a scrap of bread, a ration of milk, a pane of glass for the windows. No, during those times the people of Berlin had no eyes for the future or any room for memories.

So it wasn't until 1949 that I heard my aunt Hilde talk about Goebbels. Had she been in love with him? I couldn't say. Certainly she had sad words to say about him, which betrayed great emotion.

It was Christmas. Papa, Ursula, Peter, and I had been repatriated to Austria the previous year—my father was a native of Vienna—and we had settled temporarily in the house of my paternal grandparents in Attersee in the Salzkammergut. In turn, my grandparents had been back from Poland for about a year. Hilde had come from Berlin to celebrate the Christmas holidays with us. She had just buried my beloved Opa.

It was Christmas Eve. After dinner and a few bottles of wine, the conversation had grown animated. Only, Aunt Hilde seemed to become more serious and melancholy until she finally found relief by bursting into tears. I was dumbfounded. I remembered her from Berlin as always being stern, self-contained, and a little distant.

After that outburst she started to remember the old times, when the defeat of the Nazis was still far off and she was working beside Goebbels in the building of the Propaganda Ministry.

I listened to her in fascination. In spite of everything, Berlin was still close to my heart. One thing that particularly impressed me about her story was the description of the last occasion when she had seen her boss.

Berlin, April 21, 1945

GOEBBELS HAD SUMMONED a little group of his immediate circle to the private projection room in his villa overlooking the Tiergarten. It was here that he used to show—to his selected guests, often including the Führer in person—the anti-Semitic propaganda films that he himself had commissioned from the German film industry, of which he was in charge. That morning, however, the atmosphere seemed empty and icy. The windows had been walled up, weak bulbs cast a pale light, and the deafening clamor of battle penetrated the building from outside.

Goebbels turned up late. He was unrecognizable, unshaven, and seemed downcast. He looked like a ghost. Before feeling seized by anxiety, Hilde felt sorry for him.

As well as issuing the usual instructions for the day, Goebbels started shouting and inveighing against the German people, who had not shown themselves worthy of their Führer. The following day, April 22, as "Reichskommissar for the defense of Berlin," he would threaten with a court-martial anyone who dared to raise a white flag.

Hilde never saw him again. A few days later she received news of his suicide. He had taken his wife and children with him. Hilde was very upset, even more upset than she had been about the death of Hitler himself.

* * *

I COULDN'T SAY what Hilde saw in her former boss. Certainly, on that occasion she didn't have a single critical word to say about him. She only recalled little acts of kindness on his part, at parties, or when one of his clerks had a birthday. But as to the feelings that had driven her, they died when she did.

MY MOTHER IS PONDERING something.

"Peter turned his face away," she repeats, absorbed. "Who was Peter?"