Let Me Go (14 page)

"You've got your friend Gisela," I try to remind her again.

"Gisela?" My mother denies her for the third time. "She doesn't count."

A thought flashes through my head. That something of this woman lives within me, in my genes. I'm repelled, disgusted, but she's already clamoring for my attention again. Her memories are pressing upon her.

"Listen to this! Do you know who I ran into at the camp one day? The wife of a textile trader who had a shop in Niederschönhausen. You remember those big windows full of rolls of fabric?"

No, I really don't remember. I shake my head.

"His name was Guldenmann," she recalls, "and his wife was called Emma. They were sent to the camp. He was sent to an
Aussenlager,
and she was sent to the camp laundry. The laundry was in my block. And you won't believe this, but at night she didn't sleep a wink. She would snivel on about her three children who had been taken away from her the minute they arrived, to be sent to the bunker."

"The bunker?"

"That was what they called the gas chamber." She says it quite naturally.

"Didn't that make any impression on you?" My voice struggles to emerge from my throat.

"What?" She narrows her eyes, and the blue turns almost white.

"That plant. . ."

"No," she replies calmly, confidently. "When I decided to take the
Härteausbildung,
I knew very well why I was doing it. It was so that I wouldn't allow myself to be moved by the reality of a camp devoted to . . ." She glances at me cautiously. She hasn't uttered the word "extermination." Perhaps, I hope against hope, it's out of a strange kind of delicacy, a respect for my feelings. I'm rather surprised. Besides, it's strange that she was so keen to avoid the term. After all, it isn't one that was used by the Nazis themselves.

"I've wondered from time to time . . . " I murmur.

"What?" she asks, concerned.

I say to myself: Get it over with—we'll soon be saying good-bye to each other.

"What have you wondered?" she insists. She pulls herself up in her armchair and assumes that special interested and open expression that I have learned to distrust.

"I wondered . . . how long . . . how long did it take for the victims of the gas chambers . . . " I can't go on.

"The gas took between three and fifteen minutes to have its effect," she replies in a detached and technical tone.

"And is it true that after a certain point the exposure time was shortened?"

"Is it that important?" she says, suddenly suspicious.

"Yes, I'd like to know."

She shrugs her shoulders and her expression becomes opaque. "I wouldn't know," she replies evasively.

"You don't know or you don't want to answer?"

She sighs. "Anyway, that measure became more or less essential."

"So it was shortened?"

"What was?"

"The exposure time to the gas?"

"Well, they had to get through twelve thousand
Stück
a day—they'd raised the quota."

I'm struck dumb.

"What are you thinking?" she wants to know.

I shake my head, unwilling to speak.

"What are you thinking?" she insists, running her tongue over her lips once again in that gesture that is so natural and yet so repellent.

I say: "So it was possible that when you opened the doors of the gas chambers, there might have been some people who weren't quite dead?"

She stiffens, her eyes inscrutable again. "What on earth are you thinking about?"

"Tell me if you feel like it," I say, pressing her. My voice is hoarse all of a sudden.

"I don't know."

I get up. So does she. "What are you doing? I'm not going to eat," she whines.

"We read the visiting hours in the hallway." I nod. "They'll be over soon."

She sighs. Now her face is tense and anxious, constantly changing expression.

"Yes, that could happen," she announces through pursed lips.

"You mean some people mightn't have been dead?"

"Of course!" she cuts in impatiently. "It often happened with children. Sometimes those little
Miststücke
were more resistant to the rat poison than the adults were," she adds with a sarcastic chuckle. I take my eye off that mocking grimace and cast a glance at my cousin. She doesn't return it.

There's a pause, but I now know I won't be able to stop. I become aware of a kind of fever welling up in me, an intense craving that won't leave me in peace.

"So the ones that hadn't died ended up along with the corpses in the crematorium, children included?" My forehead is beaded with sweat.

Her face turns frosty and distant.

"I don't know," she replies, hostility in her voice.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" I exclaim aggressively. "I thought you were seen as a figure of authority at the camp! I thought they always kept you informed about everything that went on."

My ploy is successful.

"Everyone respected me," she replies. "I was an important person!"

"So you were kept informed about the running of the camp:

"Yes." She reconsiders: "Fairly well."

"And yet you didn't know that people who weren't yet dead sometimes ended up in the crematorium?"

She narrows her eyes and stares into the void. The void is her past. It's all that she has now, toward the end of her days. It's all she has—she hasn't built anything else.

At that moment she looks extremely old, quite worn-out. She looks at me and asks desolately, "What do you want from me? I'm so tired."

I won't give in. And I reply harshly, "So you won't give me an answer?"

"To what?" she groans.

"Whether anyone who was still alive ended up with the rest of the corpses in the . . ."

"In the
Krema?"

"Krema?"

"That was what we called the crematorium," she explains.

She thinks, she stares, she takes a deep breath as though preparing to dive under water.

"Yes, that could happen," she finally replies with a sigh of resignation. And she continues with the air of someone speaking just because she has a gun pressed to her temple.

"Anyway, not everyone died at the same rate. Some people are more resistant to gas than others. And then age was a factor too, as you might imagine? Newborn babies took only a few minutes; they pulled out some that were literally electric blue."

She draws to a halt because her jaw has begun to tremble again. Her face darkens. She puts an unsteady hand to her jaw to stop it from shaking, to prevent the mournful clicking of her teeth. It's a painful spectacle.

I get up and walk around a little. First I go over to the television, then to an ornamental plant. Mechanically I stroke a stiff shiny leaf.

"You are evil!" My mother shouts from her armchair and bursts into violent and convulsive tears. I'm exhausted. I anxiously consult the clock. She doesn't seem able to bear that gesture. "And stop looking at that clock all the time," she shrills, "I don't want you to leave!"

She goes on weeping, although more gently now. I don't know what to say to her. To return to our earlier subject is out of the question. I don't want to say anything at all. I feel drained.

The last thing I expect is the question that she now asks me point-blank: "Didn't you have a son?"

It comes out of the blue. "Do you remember him?"

"Vaguely . . . he was small."

"Yes, I brought him to you when I came to get you here in Vienna in '71."

"You, in Vienna? With your son? When?"

"Twenty-seven years ago."

"Twenty-seven," she repeats. "Has so much time passed?"

"So much time," I reply bitterly.

"So when did you come back?"

"We never came back."

She shakes her head. "They didn't come back. They didn't come back. Never?"

"No, never."

"But I'm a mother," she announces suddenly, her voice filled with reproach.

And I'm a daughter, I want to say, rubbing it in. But I say nothing.

There's a pause, and she stares at an empty point in the air.

"Why didn't you come with your child today?" she asks finally, in a disappointed voice.

"He couldn't come for work reasons," I reply. "He's a man now. He's thirty-two."

"Thirty-two? So big already?" She looks astonished.

I nod. "Yes. Time flies." I realize I've used an empty cliche, absurd in the context; my mind is enfeebled.

"And is he married?"

"Not yet."

"And have you a husband?"

"I'm a widow."

She thinks for a moment. "He was probably very old," she calculates.

"My husband died at the age of forty-seven," I reply.

"Really?" she says in disbelief. She presses two fingers to her temples and emits a deep sigh, as though these revelations were oppressing her mind.

"And have you got enough money?" she finally asks.

I nod. And I think about the gold she wanted to give me in 1971. "It might come in useful in an emergency," she had said. And then she had lost me.

"Does he talk about me, ever?" Her face is strained. "Does my grandson remember me?"

No, she doesn't realize. She can't imagine the trauma Renzo suffered that day in Vienna. He was five years old. My mother's indifference was a terrible disappointment to him. He had imagined he was going to find a grandmother— because his paternal grandmother clearly preferred her Italian grandsons to one who was half-Austrian—and instead he had found himself being ignored, if not rejected. I had never mentioned my mother to him again.

"Will you bring him one day?" she asks now in a tender voice, with almost convincing emotion.

"Yes," I lie.

"And will you bring me yellow roses?"

Who knows where this passion for yellow roses comes from. Were they a regular gift from her mysterious boyfriend in Berlin? And what role did he play in her life?

Following the course of these thoughts, I must have given an involuntary nod of assent, because my mother goes on, "And will your son call me
Oma?"

Oma.
Grandma, granny. No, I don't think my son would ever call her that. I look out the window. The sky is still leaden and a light rain has started to fall again.

Behind me her voice repeats: "And will your son call me
Oma?"

I turn around. I stare into those blue eyes that my son has inherited.

"Yes, he'll call you Oma."

At that moment the second gong for lunch rings out. My mother gives a start. "I don't want to eat!" she shouts, dismayed. "I want to go on talking to you."

Her eyes are narrowed, her expression imploring, but her jaw is no longer trembling.

She rises to her feet and takes a few steps toward me. "Don't go, don't go!"

She grips my arms; she lets herself go as though she's about to fall on her knees at my feet. I hold her up and bring her slowly back to her armchair.

"Do you want me to tell you something else?" She knows it's the only way of keeping me there.

I'm standing up, and she has to tilt her head back to look me in the face. In that pose, with her body twisted, her arms folded over her chest, she looks even frailer than before. But there is already a fresh gleam in her eye.

"Do you want me to tell you about the fourth one?"

"The fourth one?" I repeat automatically. I'm in a trap once again.

My mother composes herself, smooths her military woolen suit over her knee; she casts me a vaguely cheerful glance.

"Well?" I ask brusquely. "What is this mysterious fourth one?"

"If I tell you, will you stay with me a bit longer?"

I nod.

"A long time?"

"Until Fräulein Inge sends us away."

"Don't worry, she won't." She looks confident.

"Well?" I say.

"The fourth crematorium in Birkenau had no ovens," she begins as though savoring every word, apparently satisfied at having drawn me into her net, "because it was never finished. All it had was a big well filled with hot embers."

She leans toward me confidentially. "The new commander in Auschwitz found it terribly amusing. He used to line the prisoners up on the edge of the well and then have them shot, to enjoy the scene as they fell in."

I don't want to believe it. I want to be able to think that this story has been invented just to keep me here. But I know she's telling the truth.

A truth that gushes from her lips while she shows not the slightest emotion.

"There was another one," she continues, "who amused himself in the same way, but he had Jewish women brought to the well. Naked Jewish women."

"Who was he?"

"Moll, the man in charge of the crematoria. When he saw them fall into the embers, he laughed like a madman. He didn't hate anyone as much as he hated those women, not even the Russian prisoners."

I free myself from her net. "But what did you all have against the Jews?"

"Meaning who exactly?" she protests.

"Well . . . " I shrug. "All of you—Hitler, Himmler, the regime, the SS . . .
you."

"They were guilty," she replies resolutely.

"Of what?"

"Of everything. Of Germany's defeat in the First World War, of constant defeatism toward Germany, of international conspiracies to unleash fresh conflict—" She's speaking with absolute conviction, but it's as though she were reciting an old lesson, a well-established litany.

"Stop it," I interrupt her. I can't take any more. She catches her breath, and in a calmer voice I add, "It hurts me to know that my mother lived alongside sadists and criminals."

"Sadists and criminals," she repeats, struck. "It's very hard to hear your daughter say that."

"I know," I answer dryly.

She falls silent and seems to reflect for a moment. "Perhaps you're right," she says, "even if you're only partly right. War changes people, and it changed many of us as well."

So she's justified, exonerated. It's unbearable.

"War has nothing to do with extermination!" I explode. "Gas chambers aren't war; ovens in crematoria aren't war!"

"I didn't come up with the Final Solution," she replies, on the defensive, "I was only obeying orders. I had to stay loyal to my oath, and an oath is sacred. And I'll tell you something else, and it doesn't matter whether you believe me or whether you don't. Among my comrades in the SS I knew people who were intelligent, cultured, responsible, excellent family men like Rudolf Hoess . . . men of honor, unforgettable men . . ."