Munich Signature (17 page)

“There, there now friend,” the doctor crooned. “Drink first and then sleep. Yes. That’s it. Close your eyes and let your body rest.”

***

The small brass bell above the glass door jangled noisily as Bubbe Rosenfelt entered the offices of the Thomas Cook Travel Agency on the promenade just across from the Binnen-Alster Lake.

Behind the counter sat a bookish little clerk with thick round glasses and a powder of dandruff on his navy blue suit. He looked up and immediately greeted her in a crisp British accent.

“Mrs. Rosenfelt! How very good to see you! Very good to see you again,
indeed
!”

She had difficulty returning his enthusiasm. It had been impossible to sleep through the night, and her hands trembled with the strain of the last few weeks.

“Good morning, Mr. Hart.” She did not attempt to conceal her concern. “You have my tickets?”

“You are early,” he chided.

“It is eight o’clock. You open at eight?” This was not a question.

“Yes, of course. But even so I was not expecting you until after tea.”

“So, today you can have tea a little early, Mr. Hart. Today you can have it at eight in the morning instead of four in the afternoon. I’m here now. Do you have my tickets?”

He noticed the old woman’s shaking hands. Her voice cracked. He could see the stress in her eyes. The sight instantly sobered him. For twenty years he had been an agent with Thomas Cook. He had sold Mrs. Rosenfelt a ticket to America a month after Germany had lost the war in 1918. She had lost her two sons in that war, and not since that time had he seen her in such a state.

“For twenty years you have been purchasing tickets from Cook, my dear Mrs. Rosenfelt. I learned long ago to have your tickets ready at least a day early.” He hoped this reminder of their long-standing association would cheer the old woman. It did not. She stared at him strangely as if in this one moment she could remember each detail of those twenty years. Every small business trip to Paris or Brussels or London had been arranged through this agency. Often they had chatted about special arrangements to be made for shipping the porcelain with her. He had come to know little bits and pieces of business about Rosenfelt Porcelain Company. Now, of course, the Rosenfelt factory was owned by the Reich. The old woman had not had much reason to travel since then.

“Thank you, Mr. Hart.” She raised her chin slightly as if to cut off her own memories. “A fast ship to New York, I hope.”

“The
Cristobel
from Hamburg to England. Then passage on the
Queen Mary
from Southampton to New York. There is not a faster ship on the seas. Although the French think they have one in the
Normandie
.”

“A new ship?”

“You will be pleased, I think. First class, of course. And on this crossing, the
Queen
will attempt to break the speed record of the
Normandie.
Fast she is, indeed, Mrs. Rosenfelt. You shall see New York within the week.”

Bubbe Rosenfelt nodded curtly. She had expected him to perform his task well. It did not seem to occur to her that the booking on the
Queen
at such short notice was a small miracle. The great liners were filled to capacity these days with Americans leaving Europe.

“My trunks . . .” She fumbled in her black velvet handbag for the folded check. “Will you arrange for a porter to pick them up at my flat tonight?”

He frowned. Always before, the trunks of Mrs. Rosenfelt had been picked up at the gate of the large Rosenfelt estate on the Aussen-Alster. That, too, had been confiscated by the Nazis when the factory had been Aryanized. Now the old woman lived in a small flat a few blocks from here. It had been difficult to arrange for a porter to fetch her trunks. Germans were forbidden to act as servants to Jews. No German porter would go near her place. Finally Mr. Hart had arranged for an English porter from the
Cristobel
to retrieve her belongings.

“Tonight at seven?” he answered. Then, more out of curiosity than need for an answer, he asked, “And will you want me to book a return voyage for you, Mrs. Rosenfelt?”

A slight smile curved the corner of the old woman’s mouth. “At my age, Mr. Hart, it is foolish to make long-range plans,
nu
?”

“I am sure you will outlive us all, Mrs. Rosenfelt.” He sounded appalled.

“I may well outlive any Jew who is
meshugge
enough to book a return voyage to Germany.” The smile disappeared and her eyes widened at the truth in her words. “And I will certainly outlive any Jew who stays here.”

The little clerk cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Terrible times,” he muttered. “Terrible . . . terrible.”

She leveled her gaze on him. The old dignity returned. “I hope you have your travel arrangements in order, Mr. Hart. Things are not looking so good for the courtship of England and Germany either,
nu
? A few more weeks, and the Führer might pull the trigger—and every Englishman still in Germany is a bug beneath the jackboots.”

The little clerk sniffed uneasily and rummaged through his neat file for the old woman’s tickets. This was not a subject he wanted to linger on. “We all have confidence that Prime Minister Chamberlain will come to some agreement with the Führer. He has pledged himself and Britain to peace, you know.”

“So!” She frowned and reddened a bit. Her chin lifted higher as she slowly raised the pince-nez to her eyes. “So, it is peace Chamberlain wants, eh? He should have thought of that when he let the Wehrmacht march into the Rhineland! And then into Vienna.”

These were dangerous words. Mr. Hart hoped no German pedestrian would come into the office before she left. “Not our affair. No indeed, Mrs. Rosenfelt.”

She would not be silenced. “When you’re all running around London looking like a bunch of flies wearing gas masks, write me in New York, Mr. Hart! Tell me then it is not your affair!” The old woman was angry now. He had never seen her angry except for one occasion when her baggage had been lost.

The clerk smiled mechanically as he pulled her tickets from the file. “Ah! Here we are. Everything in order.” He pretended not to feel the old woman’s fierce eye on him as he scanned the documents. “All in shipshape order, Mrs. Rosenfelt!” Too cheerful. Strained. Unpleasant. He wanted her to leave. He slipped the tickets into a brown manila envelope emblazoned with the logo:
Thomas Cook—See the World, Land, and Sea!
He slid the envelope across the counter to her. For a moment he wondered about the old woman’s family. The granddaughter, Maria. He would not ask. Would not prolong the encounter.

It seemed a very long time before the old woman picked up the envelope. Her hands were no longer trembling. She was cool and aloof. “I will expect the porter at precisely seven this evening then.” She let the pince-nez drop to the end of the cord in a gesture that said,
Or else
. “Of course, Mrs. Rosenfelt.” She was leaving and the clerk was relieved. Two SS soldiers strolled by the office window outside. The old woman turned on her heel and marched out behind them. “Have a pleasant journey,” called Mr. Hart, but she seemed not to hear him as the bell above the door rang angrily.

***

Each year on the anniversary of the death of Herbert Rosenfelt, Mrs. Rosenfelt made a trip to the Jewish cemetery to commemorate his Yahrzeit. Before this Nazi nonsense had begun, she had always imagined herself someday resting peacefully beside her husband beneath the white carrara marble headstone:
Trudence, wife of Herbert.
Then it would have been the duty of Maria and the great-grandchildren to make the annual pilgrimage, place a pebble on the headstone, and say the required prayers.

No Jew in Hamburg, or all of Germany for that matter, had foreseen that politics would interrupt not only the traditions of life but those of death as well.

For the last time, Bubbe Rosenfelt pushed open the squeaking wrought iron gate of the cemetery. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted two Brownshirt Nazi youths strolling outside the high walls two blocks away. They did not seem to notice her as she slipped inside the grounds and closed the gate behind her. She sighed with relief. Everyone knew the stories of these young Aryans who lay in wait outside the synagogues and cemeteries to beat Jews who came to visit such places.

She looked over the vast field of crowded headstones. Here were old friends, members of the inner circle of her life with Herbert in the old days. Here were weddings and births and proud parents at a son’s bar mitzvah. Here were parties and quiet chats over lunch; an evening at the opera; bright songs at Hanukkah and the mellow chant of prayers during the Days of Awe. One by one old friends and relatives had come to join the generations in this quiet field. Linden trees budded each spring and shed in the fall to blanket old residents and new arrivals with leaves. Those who had once wept here beside a loved one were, soon enough, the cause of new tears. This was the only place in Hamburg Mrs. Rosenfelt regretted leaving. For a Jew, the cemetery was the last neighborhood that was safe in Germany. Unfortunately, one had to be dead in order to experience that safety. Hitler raved that the only good Jew was a dead Jew. Mrs. Rosenfelt often replied to the maniac on the radio that the only
safe
Jew was a dead Jew!

She stooped and picked up a pebble beside the headstone of Emma Goldfarb. Emma had always been a bit of a yenta. One could not share a luncheon with her without hearing every last detail of who was doing what to whom, or who had a son or daughter running off with one of
them
. Now just about everyone Emma had gossiped about was dead also. In retrospect, it made such idle conversation quite absurd.

“Well, Emma,” Mrs. Rosenfelt said wryly, “here’s something to gossip about. Trudence Rosenfelt is
finally
leaving Hamburg! You said for years I was an American at heart. Criticized me for not giving up my American citizenship. So. I’m telling you that you were right all along.
Nu?
My grandchildren I have sent off like merchandise on a freighter. And I am not staying around to have my headstone shot up by the SS for target practice, either!”

Mrs. Rosenfelt had never much approved of Emma Goldfarb. She had been quite overweight and had dreadful table manners. In spite of the seriousness of the woman’s death, Mrs. Rosenfelt had giggled when Herbert commented on the strained look of the pallbearers as they had carried the coffin through the iron gate.

Ah, but there were others here! Others who had slipped away unexpectedly. Friends who had been cut off too young, and whose faces the old woman now remembered as more youthful than her own granddaughter! How had they stayed so young in her mind, when
she
had become so very old?

She walked slowly among these old acquaintances until she came at last to the three headstones that anchored her heart to this small patch of earth.

On either side of this stone were the markers of Michael and Daniel. Although neither of the boys had been buried here, Bubbe had needed the stones as a shrine to their memory. Sweet Michael had left little Maria as a reminder of his life. Daniel had never married. Now, only Mrs. Rosenfelt remembered the curly haired baby who had grown twenty years to manhood only to be cut down in one moment of war.

The old woman stood quietly beside the graves and mourned again.
So young, so young! So very young!

“Michael,” she whispered, “your little Maria is thirty-five now. Already she has lived to be older than you were. You would be a grandfather, you know! Oy! You were so very young. And now, look at your old mother, will you?” Tears streamed freely down her cheeks. “I have come to promise you I will not let them perish! And so I must leave this place. I will not visit again. No. My sons. My husband. Sweet Herbert, I cannot come again on your Yahrzeit . . . ” With that, she reached out and touched each stone as though she were touching the faces of her loved ones. She placed the pebble on top of Herbert’s stone in a long row of pebbles that counted the visits she had made. Softly she rehearsed the ancient prayers and prayed new prayers for Maria and Klaus and the children.

Birds chirped insistently in the branches of the stately linden trees overhead. Time passed too quickly in this timeless place. Time had stopped for the husband of her youth, and she had grown old without him. In fifty years, she thought, perhaps some young Jews would stumble on this site and would notice that Trudence, wife of Herbert Rosenfelt, was not resting here beside her husband as she had planned. They would now know the reason. In fifty years even the Brownshirt Hitler Youth would be old men. Many would be dust beneath the linden trees of some other cemetery. And then, who would remember that even here the long arm of Hitler reached out to deny the final goal of an old woman?

“And so,
shalom,
my dear hearts,” she murmured. “
Shalom.
For Maria. For Klaus. For the children. I must live until they have no need of me! If God is willing,” she whispered as she closed the iron gate, “
they
will live to remember why I am not beside you, Herbert.”

***

The North Sea was called the German Ocean by some. The name seemed quite appropriate now. Klaus helped Maria walk the length of the warped deck in hopes of helping her work out the stiffness in her muscles from their cold night onboard the
Darien.

Two great battleships flying the flag of the Reich cut across the path of the little freighter. Their wakes exploded like giant surf against the bow of the ship. An old rabbi stared after their retreating hulks and patted Klaus on the arm as he steadied Maria against the rocking.

“
Oy
!” exclaimed the old man, thoughtfully stroking his beard. “You think this means we have frightened them away, maybe?”