I had no one to point at. Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing to accuse them of. The zeal for letting in the daylight, with which, as a member of the concentration camps seminar, I had condemned my father to shame, had passed, and it embarrassed me. But what other people in my social environment had done, and their guilt, were in any case a lot less bad than what Hanna had done. I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.
And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the willfully blind, accommodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?
These thoughts did not come until later, and even later they brought no comfort. How could it be a comfort that the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate, and that it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me to manage than for others. All the same, it would have been good for me back then to be able to feel I was part of my generation.
CHAPTER TWO
I MARRIED WHILE I was still clerking. Gertrud and I had met at the ski lodge, and when the others left at the end of vacation, she stayed behind until I was released from the hospital and she could take me home. She was also studying law; we studied together, passed our exams together, and began our clerking together. We got married when Gertrud got pregnant.
I did not tell her about Hanna. Who, I thought, wants to know about the other’s earlier relationships, if he or she is not the fulfillment of their promise? Gertrud was smart, efficient, and loyal, and if our life had involved running a farm with lots of farmhands and maids, lots of children, lots of work, and no time for each other, it would have been fulfilling and happy. But our life was a three-room apartment in a modern building on the edge of the city, our daughter Julia and Gertrud’s and my work as legal clerks. I could never stop comparing the way it was with Gertrud and the way it had been with Hanna; again and again, Gertrud and I would hold each other, and I would feel that something was wrong, that she was wrong, that she moved wrong and felt wrong, smelled wrong and tasted wrong. I thought I would get over it. I hoped it would go away. I wanted to be free of Hanna. But I never got over the feeling that something was wrong.
We got divorced when Julia was five. Neither of us could keep things going; we parted without bitterness and retained our loyalty to each other. It tormented me that we were denying Julia the sense of warmth and safety she obviously craved. When Gertrud and I were open and warm with each other, Julia swam in it like a fish in water. She was in her element. When she sensed tension between us, she ran from one to the other to assure us that we were good and she loved us. She longed for a little brother and probably would have been happy with more siblings. For a long time, she didn’t understand what divorce meant; when I came to visit, she wanted me to stay, and when she came to visit me, she wanted Gertrud to come too. When it was time to go, and she watched me from the window, and I had to get into the car under her sad gaze, it broke my heart. And I had the feeling that what we were denying her was not only her wish, but her right. We had cheated her of her rights by getting divorced, and the fact that we did it together didn’t halve the guilt.
I tried to approach my later relationships better, and to get into them more deeply. I admitted to myself that a woman had to move and feel a bit like Hanna, smell and taste a bit like her for things to be good between us. I told them about Hanna. And I told them more about myself than I had told Gertrud; they had to be able to make sense of whatever they might find disconcerting in my behavior and moods. But the women didn’t want to hear that much. I remember Helen, an American literary critic who stroked my back silently and soothingly as I talked, and continued to stroke me just as silently and soothingly after I’d stopped speaking. Gesina, a psychoanalyst, thought I needed to work through my relationship with my mother. Did it not strike me that my mother hardly appeared in my story at all? Hilke, a dentist, kept asking about the time before we met, but immediately forgot whatever I told her. So I stopped talking about it. There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.
CHAPTER THREE
A S I WAS taking my second state exam, the professor who had given the concentration camps seminar died. Gertrud came across the obituary in the newspaper. The funeral was at the mountain cemetery. Did I want to go?
I didn’t. The burial was on a Thursday afternoon, and on both Thursday and Friday morning I had to take written exams. Also, the professor and I had never been particularly close. And I didn’t like funerals. And I didn’t want to be reminded of the trial.
But it was already too late. The memory had been awakened, and when I came out of the exam on Thursday, it was as if I had an appointment with the past that I couldn’t miss. I did something I never did otherwise: I took the streetcar. This in itself was an encounter with the past, like returning to a place that once was familiar but has changed its appearance. When Hanna worked for the streetcar company, there were long streetcars made up of two or three carriages, platforms at the front and back, running boards along the platforms that you could jump onto when the streetcar had pulled away from the stop, and a cord running through the cars that the conductor rang to signal departure. In summer there were streetcars with open platforms. The conductor sold, punched, and inspected tickets, called out the stations, signaled departures, kept an eye on the children who pushed their way onto the platforms, fought with passengers who jumped off and on, and denied further entry if the car was full. There were cheerful, witty, serious, grouchy, and coarse conductors, and the temperament or mood of the conductor often defined the atmosphere in the car. How stupid of me that after the failed surprise on the ride to Schwetzingen, I had been afraid to waylay Hanna and see what she was like as a conductor.