Let Me Go (6 page)

We were about to say our good-byes.

"Can I do anything else for you?" she said.

I thought for a moment.

"I've just got one question," I replied cautiously, "but it's a little delicate."

"Don't worry on my account."

"All right. In that case, I'd like to ask you if you know of the existence of a person, a man, who might, in those days, have been in any way able to influence my mother in her decision to abandon her family."

She hesitated.

"I don't really know if I should . . ." she began.

"If you don't want to, it doesn't matter," I said hastily.

She bit her lip slightly. She looked like a little girl who has found herself in an awkward situation.

"If you don't want to answer, don't—" I broke off with a wave of my hand.

"No, no, I think I can say." She inhaled, as though taking a run up to something. "I don't know if this person is the one you have in mind, but there is a man with whom your mother has never lost contact. He's a former colleague—"

"From the . . . SS?"

She nods.

"And is he still alive?"

"Yes, but not in Vienna. In Berlin."

"Berlin?"

"Yes. He's younger than your mother; he was born in 1915. After the war he was condemned by an Allied court to six years' imprisonment, but he served only three of them. He never married and lives with a sister who lost her husband and two sons in the war."

She paused; her eyes were bright.

"They never stopped writing to each other," she went on after a few moments, "and since your mother has been here . . . The letters are sent through me. Heinrich . . ."

She smiled as though she had fallen into a trap.

"His name is Heinrich?"

"Yes. And now he sends the letters to my address so that I can pass them on to your mother. But lately she's been taking a long time to answer and writes only when I'm there with her. No, she's no longer the woman she once was . . ."

She wiped away a tear.

"In the past he came to Vienna a few times—I met him. Sometimes I would have dinner with them. I used to feel intimidated by him—"

"What did he think about Hitler, after all that time?"

She looked away and locked her fingers together.

"Oh you know, he wouldn't have opened up when I was there . . ."

"Would you give me his address?"

Frau Freihorst hesitated for a moment, then nodded, rummaged in a little box, found a square notepad, tore off a page, and scribbled a name and an address on it. I took the sheet of paper, folded it, and put it in my pocket without looking at it.

Time to say our last farewells.

"I nearly forgot!" She went to the bag that she had left on an armchair, and with barely concealed satisfaction and a certain solemnity, she took something out of it.

"Does this remind you of anything?" she asked, holding out a rather battered-looking teddy bear, missing an eye and an ear.

I took it and stared at it, struck dumb with surprise. At first glance it didn't mean anything to me at all, then it came to me.

"I . . . I can't believe it," I stammered.

"Your mother took it with her that evening, when she abandoned you. She always kept it with her, until she got to Ravensbrück, and there she put it in a strongbox, along with documents, photographs, certificates . . ."

"I can't believe it," I said again, unnerved.

"It's yours," she said. "It's always been yours. When I took it from your mother—and I really had to steal it away from her, believe me—I still didn't know who I was saving it for. But it didn't deserve to end up in the trash, among eggshells and banana skins."

"I don't know what to say," I murmur. "I'm touched."

But there was nothing else to say. It was time to go. I felt worn-out, wearier than I would have expected. I held out my hand to Frau Freihorst, as though to sever the slender bonds that seemed to want to hold me captive. I looked around once more and felt a lump in my throat. I instinctively gave my mother's friend a quick hug.

"Thank you. Many, many thanks for everything."

Then Eva and I made our way toward the front door. We had sensed that Frau Freihorst wanted to keep us in the flat a little longer.

We were about to leave when we heard her exclaiming, "I forgot, he's called Zakopane!"

I turned around. "Who is?"

"The teddy bear! He's called that because he was bought in Zakopane in Poland."

I smiled. "Thank you. Now I remember my grandmother talking about him."

Eva left first. I followed her and pulled the door shut behind me.

"WHERE DID YOU get the teddy bear?" Her tone is acid, her expression threatening.

"If you don't mind, I'll leave you alone for an hour or so," Fräulein Inge says. "I imagine you'd like to be on your own for a while."

The guest room is cozy: a television, a wicker book-case full of books, pretty ornamental plants. I arrange three armchairs beneath one of the three big windows.

"Come on, sit down," I tell my mother; but she goes on repeating, like a broken record, "Where did you get that teddy bear? I want to know!"

I walk over to her and hold out my hand. "Would you give it back to me, please?"

"No!" she snaps, pressing it to her chest. I try to come up with a clever tactic. I open the bag and take out my lipstick.

She stares at it, confused.

"Swap?"

She purses her lips. It seems to me that she's trying to control herself with all her power because she starts to shake her head vehemently. But soon desire for the lipstick defeats her.

"I've lost mine," she whines. "I lost it a long time ago. It was in a gold case."

"Problem solved," I reply with an encouraging smile. "I'll give you the lipstick, and you give me the teddy bear."

"N-no," she says hesitantly. But when I move as if to put the lipstick back in the bag, she grabs it from my hand, giving me back the toy. Well, I say to myself with satisfaction, that could have gone worse.

The lipstick disappears into the pocket of her jacket, and she looks at me anxiously. "Are you staying for a while?"

"Of course," I answer with surprise. "Do you want me to stay?"

"Yes," she says, and a helpless, trembling smile appears on her lips. "Yes, I really want you to stay."

"We've still got some time," I reply, softening slightly. And I add agreeably, "Come and sit near us, please do."

She makes herself comfortable, smoothing her clothes precisely over her thin thighs. For a moment there is silence.

"Why don't you tell me something?" I ask her to break the ice. "How do you like it here? Have you made any friends?"

She doesn't reply immediately. She emits a long sigh, almost a hoarse sob, and declares darkly, "Stefan is dead."

Certainly, my father died a long time ago now, but she announces the fact as though it had happened yesterday. An expression of suffering spreads across her face, but then gradually a cloud of touchy arrogance settles over her eyes.

"He's better off dead!" she exclaims cynically and resentfully. "He was a bad man. Yes, he was a bad man!" she says, working herself up. "He was forever trying to obstruct everything I did. He didn't want me to take an interest in politics; every meeting I went to was a tragedy. He didn't want me to make a career in politics, you know? He demanded that I stay at home and clean and cook and look after the children."

"Didn't looking after the children strike you as the right thing to do?" I ask, disconcerted.

"My comrades had children too, but their husbands weren't as mean and jealous as mine. I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear all that jealousy, that obtuseness of his. He wouldn't understand that I had tasks to perform, specific tasks."

"What did you have to do?"

"Train the auxiliaries. And I got them to respect me, you can be sure of that! I got them standing in straight lines, all right. Why couldn't my husband look after the little girl every now and again?"

"You had two children," I remind her. I'm getting used to filling in her gaps.

"Two?" she says, baffled.

"You don't remember your son, Peter?"

"Peter?"

Her face grows dark. "Oh, yes. Peter. But he's dead too. He's been dead for ages."

Her bright eyes seem to cloud over for a moment. She buries her face in her hands.

"My son is dead and I will never see him again," she whines through her fingers.

"Peter's still alive," I tell her. That was unwise; she bursts into floods of tears.

"You mustn't come here and tell me lies! You're hurting me. You're hurting me so much that I'll have to ask for some drops."

Eva glances at me, perplexed. I nod: Fine, I'll try not to push her too hard. But my mother is already taking her hands away from her face, and starting to smooth her hair. There's no getting around it: She throws me every time.

"Do you like the color of my hair?" she asks innocently. I nod mechanically.

"I was fair as a girl," she begins, with a melancholy air, "but I can't go to the hairdresser here. You couldn't come one day and take me to the hairdresser?"

I glance uneasily across at my cousin, who gives me a barely perceptible nod in reply, suggesting that I stay on this track. So I reply in the affirmative, knowing that I'm lying.

"Seriously?" my mother rejoices. "You promise?"

"Of course," I reply, a little too loudly.

She looks around as though searching for something.

"Where are my flowers?" she asks eagerly.

"Fraulein Inge took them away."

"Why?" she protests. "They're mine!"

"You threw them on the floor."

She stares at me in disbelief. "Really?"

"Yes."

She thinks for a moment, searching for an excuse. "Perhaps because they weren't yellow roses."

She brushes the problem aside and returns to the subject of my father.

"I had to leave him," she recalls in a colorless voice, "I had no choice. I was so busy . . . and he used to torment me. My sister-in-law tormented me too; she didn't want me to carry out my duties."

"What duties?" I ask.

"With the Party. And I'd taken an oath, I couldn't go back on it."

"You'd taken an oath?"

"As a member of the SS I had to take an oath; that's perfectly normal, isn't it? I had to swear absolute obedience and loyalty until death."

"Why did you take an oath when you knew you had two children to raise?" I say, knowing that it's risky. At once she raises her head.

"I wanted to! I wanted to be accepted as a member of the SS; I wanted it more than anything else in the world."

"Was it more important than your family?"

She nods. "Yes, but you can't understand. No one can understand nowadays . . ."

It's true. I'm discouraged. I feel powerless.

In any case, she was only one of thousands and thousands of women who had allowed themselves to be swept along by the Nazis' ideological propaganda. Though, certainly, not everyone had done so to the extent of joining Himmler's organization

She sees that I'm lost in thought and asks, "Are you sad? I don't want that! You mustn't be sad!" She gets to her feet as though to embrace me. I manage to stop her just in time: I couldn't bear it, not now.

"Why don't you tell me about your parents?" I suggest.

She narrows her eyes.

"My parents?" she repeats, disoriented. "Why should I tell you about my parents?"

"They were my maternal grandparents," I reply, calmly and firmly.

There is genuine vacancy in her eyes. "Your maternal grandparents," she murmurs. She can't find her way out of this one. Finally, to round off, she puffs, "You didn't miss much."

"Why do you talk about them like that?"

"They were against me," she mumbles. "They voted 'no' in the plebiscite, just to spite me."

"Which plebiscite?"

"For the annexation of Austria!" she says, to refresh my memory. "My parents didn't want it. They didn't want the Nazis and they didn't want the Führer. And they were always opposed to my membership the Party. They thought I was degenerate and fanatical. So in the plebiscite, they voted 'no.' Perhaps they thought the Party would expel me, but it didn't. Then, when they found out about Ravensbrück, they told me they were disowning me. Disowning your daughter, can you imagine?"

"Ravensbrück?"

All of a sudden she looks at me cagily, like a suspicious old fox.

"Perhaps you don't know . . ." she says evasively. "It doesn't matter."

"I know you were in Ravensbrück," I reply in a neutral voice. "Why don't you tell me something about it? I'm interested."

She tilts her head and gives me a sly smile; then she flutters her eyelashes and tries to avoid the question.

"When you were little, I used to call you
Mausi,
do you remember?"

She smiles, her face softer now. "You were stubborn and disobedient," she remembers. "You were clever and rebellious. And you used to like hopping on one leg."

Again I'm thrown: She can twist me around her little finger. I wonder: Did I really live with my mother for four years? With my biological mother, the one who brought me into the world? With a real mother, even if she was too busy to be one?

I'd rather bring her back to the subject of Ravensbrück, but she continues obstinately down her own path.

"I want to talk about Berlin," she insists. "You remember we were living in a fine apartment in Niederschönhausen? And sometimes I would take you to the park or to a friend's kitchen garden."

She half-closes her eyes for a moment. "But your father was always cross," she recalls. "He wanted to keep me locked up in the house, like being locked in a cage."

Suddenly, with one of those unexpected bursts of energy that I have now learned to recognize, she hurls herself out of the armchair and kneels at my feet. She studies me, eyes bright with tears, burying her chin in my lap.

"My daughter," she repeats two or three times, sighing emphatically. "Will you come back tomorrow?"

She grips my hands and starts kissing them furiously. "Don't leave me alone," she begs, "never again!"

I feel excruciatingly embarrassed. And as I go to lift her up, she appears to faint. She closes her eyes and drops lifelessly to her knees. With Eva's help, I manage to put her back in her armchair. I'm about to go into the corridor to call someone when I hear her chuckling behind me. "So? Where do you think you're going?" I turn around: She gives me a mocking smile.