A Feather on the Breath of God Read online

  She was not the only German war bride in the projects. Now and then a group of them would go into Manhattan, to Eighty-sixth Street, to shop in the German stores. When there was a bit of extra money, a German movie; coffee and cake at the Café Wagner, or at the Café Hindenburg, said to be where the New York branch of the Nazi party had held their meetings.

  I am daunted when I try to imagine her pregnant. In those days she was a slender woman, almost frail. In photographs her mouth is dark, the corners lifted, not in a true smile, but more of a my-thoughts-are-very-far-away expression. I try to picture her in one of the humiliating maternity dresses of the day (“a large bright bow at the neck or a frilly bib will draw attention away from the stomach”). She wears her long hair pinned back.

  When I try to imagine her, she becomes stilled: a figure in a painting. She sits in an armchair that she has turned toward the window. From this angle you cannot tell that she is pregnant. Her one-year-old and her three-year-old lie in the next room; she has just gotten them down. She is exhausted, so heavy in her chair she thinks she will never rise again.

  Blue smudge like a thumbprint under each eye. What is she looking at? Through the window: water tower against leaden sky. What is she thinking of? Schooldays. A million years ago! Trude, Edda, Johanna, Klara. Klara dead. And the rest? Surely none so unhappy as she? Rudolf! At last she bestirs herself: With a furious gesture she wipes a tear from her eye.

  I don’t like to remember what she told me when I was twenty: Becoming pregnant with me was the last straw.

  She used to say, “If we’d had money everything would have been different.” I didn’t understand why we didn’t get help, like many of our neighbors. “Welfare! Are you mad? Those people should be ashamed.” But she was already ashamed. I saw it in her face when she had to tell people my father was a waiter. I thought taking money from the government would be better than always complaining. “You want us to be like the Feet?” (The family next door was named Foot.) “Ten kids to support and the father sits around drinking.” But wasn’t Mr. Foot better off than my father, who worked seven days a week and never took a vacation? Didn’t happiness count for anything in our house?

  There were periods when my mother cried every day. If you asked her why she was crying she would say, “I want to go home.” Other times, when she’d “had it” with us, when she made it clear that we were more than any person could bear, with our noise and our mess and our laziness, she would threaten to leave us and go home. (I think I sensed something in those threats to go home that I’m now sure was there: the threat of suicide.)

  About the Germans Nietzsche has said: They are of the day before yesterday and of the day after tomorrow; they have no today. Coming of age, my mother had shared in the dream of a grandiose destiny. Now she became one throbbing nerve of longing.

  We believed her when she said that every night she dreamed she was back in Germany. She made us promise that when she died we would bury her in Germany. “In German soil,” is what she said. She understood those Russian soldiers who had gone to war with a pouch of soil around their necks so that if they fell, a bit of Russia would be buried with them. She had the Teutonic obsession with blood and soil. She made us promise also that if she was ever in an accident, we would not authorize a transfusion. She would rather die than have someone else’s blood in her.

  I am seventeen, a freshman in college, invited to dinner by one of my professors. Helping his wife with the dishes, I start humming a tune. The woman looks hard at me but says nothing. Sometime later, the professor asks me whether I knew what I was singing. I tell him what I thought it was: an old German song; my mother used to hum it sometimes when she was doing her housework. He says, “Actually, it’s the Horst Wessel song.” The anthem of the Nazi party.

  A few years before this, I had gone with my mother to a record store on Eighty-sixth Street, where she was surprised to find an album of German marching songs. “I can’t believe they would sell this here.” Back home, watching her listen, I saw that look of bewilderment and tenderness that comes over the faces of people when they are presented with something that recalls times past. I saw that same look on her face sometimes when we watched newsreels from the war years on TV, and though I was not there when she watched a videotape of Triumph of the Will (she’d been taken to see the film more than once as a schoolgirl), I’m sure she was touched in the same way.

  She never played the record again. “I just wanted to hear it that once.”

  Now and then came packages from Germany, which often included sweets. Once, a box of small bottle-shaped chocolates wrapped in colored foil and filled with liqueur. My mother’s eyes lit up. “I haven’t had these for years!” But before tasting one she wavered. “I shouldn’t, it will just remind me of home.” A good thing she warned us: From the way she slumped in her chair we might have thought she’d been poisoned. I will never forget the sound she made. Many years later, to thank me for taking care of his plants while he spent Christmas in Denmark, a neighbor of mine brought me back a box of those same chocolate bottles, and at the mere sight of them I felt as if a poison had entered my veins.

  Heimweh, “Another word you have no English for.” Homesickness? “Yes, but more than that.” Nostalgia? “Stronger than that.”

  She had a pretty voice, my mother. She sang all the time—always German songs. I liked especially “Lili Marleen.” Often she sang the melody of a song, without words. Her version of the Horst Wessel song was molto adagio, more like a torch song than a call to arms. I had trouble reconciling that melancholy tune with the words when I eventually came across them in a book. “Raise high the flag! Stand rank on rank together. Storm troopers march with steady, quiet tread.”

  “Deutschland über Alles”: “A real piece of music, not like your unsingable ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’” I remember hearing something Haydn said of his “Emperor” quartet, from which the music for the German anthem was taken: In his moments of deepest despair, he would listen to it and be comforted.

  Now I want to recall those words of Virginia Woolf, about childhood: “A leaf of mint brings it back … a cup with a blue ring.” Nazi Germany was the only Germany my mother knew. Her whole youth had been lived under the sign of the swastika. She never said it, but it had to be true: When she saw the swastika, she thought of home.

  In third grade I had a friend named Hannah Segal. Her mother too was from Germany. Mrs. Segal’s accent was only slightly different from my mother’s. “Doesn’t she want to go back?” “Oh, no, she would never go back, she hates Germany.” Strange!

  When I was growing up, the Germans you saw in movies or on television were almost always men in uniform. They had sputtering accents and scars on their cheeks. They moved like oafs. They blundered and shrieked. They could not have struck fear in a dog. I knew better. I knew that Germans were to be taken with utmost seriousness. I knew that Germans could command so you would have to obey.

  I was ten when Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem. My first view of the famous photographs. “Should Eichmann Be Punished for His Crimes, and If So, How?” (Essay competition.) I was twelve when I read the Diary of Anne Frank.

  One night I dreamed I met Anne Frank in a wooded area near the projects. She was hiding out. She had escaped Bergen-Belsen and survived all these years (though she was still a young girl). She didn’t want anyone to know. She would not believe me when I told her that the war had been over for years, and the Nazis no longer existed. She made me promise not to give her away.

  It was said that all Germans were on trial with Eichmann. Neighbors fascinated by the testimony prodded my mother for details of life in the Reich. She never brought up her father. (“It would be as if I were making excuses.”)

  “I am still proud to be German.” “I do not apologize for being German.” But during this time she was depressed. By then we had moved away from Brooklyn, to another housing project, where there were no Germans. My mother might hang out with the other women on the benches, but
she was not really friends with any of them. She would never feel at home among Americans. She had the European contempt for Americans as “big kids.” She found herself constantly having to bite her tongue; for example, when one of the women complained about the war: “I don’t know what it was like for youse over there, but here you couldn’t even get your own brand of cigarettes”

  I don’t think a day went by that she did not remember that she was German. Watching the Olympics, she rooted for the Germans and pointed out that, if you counted East and West together, Germany came out ahead of both the Americans and the Russians.

  It was not to be hoped that any American—let alone an American child—could grasp what this unique quality of being German was all about. I don’t recall how old I was, but at some point I had to wonder: If you took that quality away from her, what would have replaced it? What sort of person might she have been? But her Germanness and her longing for Germany—her Heimweh—were so much a part of her she cannot be thought of without them. To try to imagine her born of other blood, on other soil, is to lose her completely: There is no Christa there.

  She saw herself as someone who had been cheated in life—but cheated of what, exactly? Not a career. She never missed having a job. She was not one of those women who can say, If I hadn’t had a family I’d have gone to med school. (Back then, people would say of certain women: She never married, she was a career girl.) My mother always saw herself as a housewife. During one especially lean spell, when it looked as if she might have to earn some money, the only job she could think of was cleaning houses. But just because she saw her place as in the home didn’t mean she was happy there. The everlasting struggle against the soiled collar and scuff-marked floor brought on true despair. In that struggle, as every housewife knows, children are the worst enemy. Her big cleaning days were the darkest days of my childhood. She booted us out of one room after the other, her mood growing steadily meaner. We cowered in the hallway, listening to her curses and the banging of her broom, awaiting the inevitable threats to go home. Many were the objects in that house that we were not allowed to touch. We were allowed to sit only on certain chairs. When she got a new couch, loath to expose it to wear and tear, she left it wrapped in the plastic it had come in. It stayed so clean under there, she ended up wrapping the chairs in plastic too.

  We offered to help her clean, but she refused. “All you do is smear the dirt around.” Besides, she was not going to be one of those parents who use their kids as servants. (Mrs. Foot, for example, who had her six-year-old girl doing the vacuuming.)

  Everyone had his or her proper sphere. “You kids just worry about your schoolwork.”

  “If we’d had money, everything would have been different.” In the ads for lotto, people tell their dreams, which often turn out to be of travel, preferably to exotic places. But seeing the world was no more one of my mother’s dreams than being a doctor. What would she want? A big house. A big yard. “And a big fence!” No more living on top of other people!

  She would live in one housing project or another for most of her adult life.

  She never played lotto. She thought chance played too large a part in people’s lives as it was. And she didn’t believe in good luck anyway.

  I don’t know that her life would have been different if she’d had more money. In later years, when my sister wanted to hire someone to clean for my mother, she refused. Maids: “They just smear the dirt around.” (Dirt. Contamination. The horror they inspired in her went deep. When she spoke of dirt encountered somewhere—someone else’s house, say—she would shake herself like a drenched dog. We were not allowed to use public toilets, which made going anywhere with her an ordeal.)

  Money. Visiting me in my first apartment, she happened to hear me tell my landlord that the rent would be a little late that month. She didn’t understand why I wasn’t ashamed of that. She had been uneasy too about my applying for a college scholarship; she would rather have paid. She would never understand how I could accept loans and gifts of money from other people. Down to my last penny: Why didn’t I blush when I said that? “I don’t know how I could have raised a daughter like that.”

  A simple life. Up in the morning, the first one. Fix the coffee, wake the others, bundle them out the door. Dishes, beds, dust. The youngest child home for lunch. Dishes, laundry. Sometime in the afternoon, between lunch and the children’s return, a pause. Lose yourself in a book. Page 50. Page 100. An errant duke. A petty dowager. A handsome and truehearted stepbrother. The heroine swathed in shawls against castle drafts. Romance. A thing ludicrous to imagine with her husband, with whom she had never been in love. At best she treated him like one of the children: “Wipe your feet off before you step in this house!”

  Her early heartbreak (Rudolf) had made her defiant. She didn’t owe anyone anything. She didn’t have to be nice. “I can’t stand to be in the same room as you!” She wasn’t going to play the hypocrite. “I wish that we had never met!”

  A riddle: If it was true what she said, that she expected nothing from her husband, why was she forever seething with disappointment?

  The threat to divorce him became part of her litany of threats. But she was never interested in anyone else, not even after he died, though she was then just forty-six. I think the idea of having an affair embarrassed her. And: “One husband was enough!” Certainly the subject of sex embarrassed her. (I come home from a pajama party burdened with new knowledge, something that, for all its preposterousness, I sense with a full heart must be true; but when I ask her whether people really do it, without hesitation she says no.

  Wife and mother: Dissatisfying as that role may have been, it is hard to imagine her in any other. Outside the house she lost her bearings. Any negotiation beyond that required for simple domestic errands flustered her. She hated going out. She hated having to deal with strangers. Even worse: running into people she knew. But she was always cordial. She would stop and chat—often at length—putting on a chumminess that I feared others would see through, and I guess some did.

  She was intimidated by authority. My decision to change my major my junior year in college bothered her. “Are you sure you don’t get into trouble for that?” “You sure they let us park here?” she would ask, peering anxiously about. Some part of her always remained that child on the stairs watching the arrest of her parents. The ringing of the telephone could stop her heart. An unexpected knock at the door, and she would widen her eyes in warning at us, a finger to her lips. We all held our breath. When the person had gone, she would peek out from behind the window shade to see who it was. Whenever she had to go somewhere she hadn’t been before, she was terrified of getting lost. Her fear revealed itself in flushed cheeks and repeated swallowings; I held on to her icy hand. Oh, the trouble you could meet going into the city! Much better to stay home. At home she was the authority, the only one permitted to do as she pleased, to be herself

  It was as a teenager, I suppose, that I decided that maybe what she needed was the right man. In our neighborhood there were many examples of the rugged type: men with square faces and corded arms, who earned their living by brawn. I thought my mother might have been better off with one of them. (But this was my fantasy; she never expressed any attraction to such men.) Her upbringing had resulted in a paradox: Though she feared authority, she approved of it, she would have liked to see more of it. (The trouble with Americans? They are too free. The trouble with most kids? They are not disciplined enough.) Perhaps her ideal man would have been a cop. At any rate, she needed someone strong, the sort of man with whom a woman feels safe. A scoff-at-your-fears sort of man. She implied that her father had been something like this, before Dachau. My father—fumbling, shy, so fearful of authority himself—would not do. She was the one who had to drive, who carried the kids’ bicycles up and down the stairs. She wore the pants. Like so much else, this whetted her scorn. “My lord and master—hah!” No sympathy for him when he was down with a cold—“He sneezes twice and it’s the end o
f the world”—or when for a time he had nightmares and often woke her with his cries. Nor did she expect sympathy from him. Only once did I ever see her turn to him: when her father died.

  Outbursts triggered by his gambling, his English, his superstition against making out a will. Once started, she could not stop herself. Her rage tore like a cyclone through the house. Afterward we would all sit in a kind of stupor in which the cat and even inanimate objects seemed to share.

  My mother sobbed. “I’m not asking for that much.” But she was: She was asking him to be someone else.

  Finally, it was enough that he kept himself apart, letting her take care of the house and the children as she wished, leaving her alone. A large element of relief when he died: She was no longer daily reminded.

  At times it seemed as if she had but one emotion: loathing. I think she often experienced what Rilke described: “The existence of the horrible in every atom of air.”

  She had that love for animals that is unmistakably against humans. “Now I know men, I prefer dogs.” This remark of Frederick the Great’s—quoted by Hitler—expresses a famous German sentiment. My mother: “I feel worse if I see a dog suffering than if it were a man.” Said without apology; with a tinge of pride, even. As if it were superior, to prefer dogs. In one of the houses of a zoo I went to in Germany, the visitor comes to a plaque announcing the animal to be seen in the next cage: the most savage creature of all, the only one to kill its own kind, to kill for pleasure, and so on. A mirror behind bars. When I was there someone had written in English on the wall under the plaque: “You krauts oughta know!” And under that was written in French: “Of all our maladies, the most virulent is to despise our own being—Montaigne.”