I can see myself sitting there in my white shirt, the beam of light from the kitchen lamp doesn’t reach me, my nanny shades me from it, the shirt is crumpled, and if I were under the light you might be able to make out dark stains on the materiaclass="underline" mud, colored crayon, dried blood. Maria. She can’t yet have been twenty years old.
2
THAT NIGHT IN the Great Garden it was only for an instant that my parents flashed through my mind and then, strangely, they vanished from my thoughts, just as they themselves later vanished for good; they were never found. They must have been killed, but against all reason I have often played with the idea that they survived but believed me to be dead, they wouldn’t give up, and the authorities could not shake them off until, in a fit of the most extreme brutality perhaps, they went so far as to show them the body of a young boy disfigured by the flames, and since they could do nothing and nobody would help them, after a few weeks they moved on. I know that I have always clung to this notion whenever I recall the elderly man and woman squatting right next to me on the grass. They might have been my parents. And in the darkness I simply didn’t recognize them. Two figures, aging from one instant to the next, with burns on their faces: I had never seen anything like it. How would I know my own living parents from so many dead? After all, when I first saw myself again in a mirror, this face bore no resemblance to the one I knew from photos and memory.
What have you let yourself in for, you poor girl? I blurted out at one point, and as soon as I said it I could have bitten off my tongue — what a job the interpreter had taken on, trying to learn by heart the whole of the local birdlife here in March, of all months. If the foreign guest had only put off his visit until the winter or even until high summer, if only he had waited just a few weeks, but as it was she would have to take into account all the overwintering species, the breeding birds together with the summer visitors, because not all of the former had left yet, and not all of the latter had yet arrived.
“So then you got stuck in Dresden?”
You could put it that way, I got stuck here, although after leaving Posen we were only passing through Dresden. As far as I can recall, my father, who was a botanist, met some colleagues, and my mother showed me around the city where she had lived for a while before I was born, perhaps the happiest time of her short life. I thought I sensed that as we strolled through the old town together, if you believe an eleven-year-old could sense such a thing. I think we retraced her steps as a young girl, and she never used the new names, she persisted with Theaterplatz, Augustus-Strasse, Jüdenhof, and Frauenstrasse, whenever we stopped for her to tell me something, in the bright, mild weather, a kind of false spring surrounding us that February. In the afternoon we would sit in a café and watch the life around us, Wildsruffer Strasse, Scheffelstrasse, Webergasse, they all still existed then, the city was full of people, and I tried to make eye contact with this or that refugee girl, or an older, limping man, even if I never forgot what my family had drummed into me — although our family had nothing at all to fear — once when we were safe from observation: never look an SS man full in the face.
For me it was — I know this sounds strange — a proper holiday, although a little incident took place of which I was ashamed, and as an adult, truth to tell, went on being ashamed for many years. Coming from the Theaterplatz, it must have been in the morning, we walked past the House of Assembly, and then we were taking the steps up to the Brühl Terrace when I came across a sign: JEWS NOT ADMITTED. And, yes, children find it hard to suppress cruel impulses, children sometimes behave like maniacs, but all the same there’s no excuse, I don’t know what came over me: I stopped and was gripped by a feeling of triumph, halfway to the top I looked up, then again at the notice, and strutted — I wasn’t walking now, I was strutting — up the remaining steps, we’re allowed onto the Brühl Terrace, we’re not Jews. At the top I turned around, saw the Court Church, Augustus Bridge, the Italian Village below, and then my mother, who had reached the landing. She stopped too. I can remember it as though it were yesterday, I looked into her suddenly narrowed eyes, and I could sense that, at the end of her sleeve in the heavy winter coat, her hand was twitching: my mother, who had never hit me in her life, came close to slapping my face in broad daylight.
So my nanny really did not travel with us after all, the white Sunday shirt with dark stains, a young boy on the kitchen bench seat, utterly dazed. Perhaps my parents fired her that very evening.
On that Shrove Tuesday my mother even wanted to take me to the zoological museum, which she had often visited in her Dresden days, but when we turned from the Postplatz into Ostra-Allee we could see immediately that the building was no longer there, it had been flattened in an air raid the previous October. My mother obviously knew nothing about that, just as I could not know then that I was standing in front of the ruins of an institution which I myself would work in, many years later.
At lunch my father was still with us. We were sitting at a first-floor window somewhere looking down on a large square, so we had probably turned into the Old Market, the sunshine was pouring in, almost blindingly, and we three had a window table to ourselves. The light was strange, pallid; the mashed potatoes on my plate were steaming, as though the sun’s rays were heating them. I also had peas and a ground-meat “German beefsteak,” no doubt eked out with a large quantity of breadcrumbs, which I had taken a bite out of and then left. Beefsteak. I had only just learned this word for “meatball,” at home we said Frikadelle, the new word seemed strange to me: when I found it on the menu I had thought it both promising and off-putting, and if I decided to risk it when we ordered our food, it was not so much because of an appetite for meatballs but because I wanted to see, and taste, whether my father’s explanation was right, or whether — despite its related appearance and similar taste — there was something quite different about a “beefsteak.” No, it wasn’t the same thing, even if my parents did insist, almost despairingly, that it was just a different name.
Until the food arrived, my mother left her wonderful dark otter-skin cap lying on the table. As always, my mother seemed very elegant to me, she attracted attention, but on this day in this restaurant there were also black looks coming from other tables, my father noticed it.
“Please, can’t you put your otter cap away?”
But she behaved as though she had seen nothing, heard nothing, and tugged at his tie, which was always crooked, improving the knot, examining the collar, and looking into my father’s face. He turned away and grimaced, but she knew he liked it, just as he liked her putting on her jewelry, the pearl earrings, the bracelet, and the little chain necklace; we weren’t refugees, we were people out for a meal in the metropolis, and the woman opposite him was his wife, and it didn’t matter what other diners made of her outfit. She in a simple dress, with her shoulder-length hair elegantly cut, and he in clothes undecided between a visit to the big city and a country ramble, with his rough mittens which embarrassed me a bit when I saw other gentlemen with their buckskin gloves placed neatly at the edge of the table. My mother ran her fingers through his always unkempt mop of hair, that’s the kind of thing they played at in my presence. I looked down at the square, I looked into the sun, the food arrived, I put the otter cap on the windowsill.