Where did all of that go . . . what happened to the radios and the people around them, with all the full-color inserts in the magazines? The little blond girl from the ad for the children’s radio hour is now an old woman in hospice and she probably doesn’t even remember her own name.
24.
It was a true revelation for me to look through the half-open door into another room and see an elderly woman, who had arrived with a completely blank face, devoid of any emotion, with an empty gaze, suddenly come to life when she saw the huge wooden radio with the dial of cities on it, and start reading it aloud.
London, Budapest, Warsaw, Prague
Toulouse, Milan, Moscow, Paris
Sofia, Bucharest . . .
Ooh, Sofia, she said, Sofia. In such situations my job was to tactfully draw closer, to strike up a conversation, to be ready to hear a story, to encourage her to remember. She turned out to be an emigrant from Bulgaria. Her father had been a German engineer who had married a Bulgarian woman, they had lived in a nice house with a yard in some village near Sofia, near the mountain . . . she couldn’t remember the name anymore. Her nephew, who had brought her to the clinic, stood next to us and could not believe that his aunt was speaking and livening up. That must be her language, Bulgarian, he said.
For a person who had been silent for so many years in a given language, she spoke very well. Of course, her story was broken up by some blank spots in her memory, in her language, but then it would pick up again in another place. She remembered how in the evenings they would gather around the radio for the music hour. As for the news, only her mother and father listened to it. But they would all listen to the concerts for the soldiers on the front and the classical concerts together. She talked about the blinking light on the radio, how she would read out the cities on the dial like a counting-out rhyme, imagining what lay behind each name.
I remember doing the same thing as a child, that dial was my first Europe and I thought that every city had a different sound and if you moved the dial, the condenser, you’d hear the sound of the noisy streets of Paris or people arguing in a London square. Who knows why, but I always imagined that in London there was somebody squabbling . . . The world was closed and those city names were the only proof that somewhere out there beyond the fading, the crackling, the deliberate jamming, those cities existed, and in them some other people with kids were also sitting around their radio, and if I pricked up my ears enough I could hear what they talked about in the evenings.
And the woman kept on talking and talking . . . And then . . . the radio ordered us, schnell, schnell, we must run, the Russian troops, I kleine Mädchen of nine, a blue cardigan, rote buttons . . . Mama . . . a little bunny here, she pointed at the upper right-hand side of her cardigan, Mama had sewed a Kaninchen there . . . we have to run, Daddy is German, German, they’ll kill him . . . and Grandma yelled . . . here bad, bad, run . . . last train and quick, quick, schnell, airplanes, shooting krrrrrrr train stops, down, we lie. . . grass, grass . . .
Grass . . .
A long pause, as if she had lost her train of thought . . .
Grass . . .
Again a pause, then suddenly the memory comes back, swooping over her head like an airplane . . . Her face is twisted in fear, she raises her arms . . .
(Is it possible, I think I know this woman from somewhere . . .)
Her nephew hugs her . . . I’m not sure she even notices him, he is absent from this memory, she is now in 1944 . . . her language becomes completely broken, more German words slip in . . . Achtung . . . The train is carrying the last German employees, refugees, families . . . the planes are dropping bombs, the train stops, they have to jump out and lie on the ground. The scent of soil, bullets around her, her mother’s body, she doesn’t mention her father . . . but a cow appears, walking toward them, it breaks into a run, stops and looks around, then starts running again, frightened by the bombs and the shooting . . . Get out of here, little cow, the woman yells, the girl yells, Get out of here, cow . . . they’re killing you . . . but the cow clearly doesn’t hear, mooo, right at the girl . . . and then a piece of shrapnel (I’m filling in the unclear parts of the story) hits the cow in the rump, she starts bleeding and limping mooo, mooo, mooo, the woman moos, Hey, cow, hey, cow . . . she gets up and starts running toward the cow, her mother pulls her down sharply and she falls . . . where, where . . . mooo, mooo . . . oh, cow, oh, cow, you not dying, I saving you . . . the cow is lying in front of her, shaking its head . . . and eyes . . . It has eyes and cow cry, the girl-woman is saying, it’s crying, crying, and she’s crying . . .
Tante, tante, her nephew keeps saying in German, with all the awkwardness of a person witnessing a taboo scene, calm down. Do something, he turns to me, she’s crying . . .
She’s remembering, I say, that’s why she’s crying . . .
Hilde! All of a sudden the name comes to me. Hilde, I say loudly, grasping the woman’s hand. The nephew is stunned, How do you know her name?—they are here for the first time, and I wasn’t the one who did her intake registration. She raises her head and looks at me. She won’t recognize me. Twenty or so years ago I was sitting in her living room in Frankfurt, my wife and I had stayed at her place for two nights, a friend had put us in touch. I wrote something about her back then. Hilde, the woman who saved Germany.
She doesn’t recognize me. I hold her hand and speak to her in Bulgarian, I tell her that I see that cow, it is now grazing at the right hand of God, because it wasn’t alone when it died, it had seen a young girl talking to it . . . that is a happy death. Other cows now die unhappily, but that one had been embraced, so everything is okay now, she is okay. I realize that I am not speaking to the elderly woman, but to that nine-year-old girl, and she quiets down, sits on the sofa, lets her head loll back, and falls asleep.
25.
Hilde, Who . . .
I’ll wait for you at the aerodrome Hilde said on the phone. Her voice was bright, her Bulgarian was from the ’40s. There are words that suddenly open unexpected doors into other times. For a moment I wondered whether, when we met up at the Frankfurt airport, which was indeed an aerodrome, it would be 1945 or 2001. (That’s when this conversation took place.) As if, from this moment on, that “aerodrome” would be the “madeleine” of my memory, which would tie me to Hilde. Along with two more things that come up in this story—a cooking pot and the most average, ordinary factory-made bread.
Of course, Hilde was waiting for us right on time at the aerodrome, splendid in her early seventies. Outside Bulgaria’s borders, people age more beautifully and more slowly, old age is more merciful elsewhere.
Here is the place to mention that Hilde was born in Bulgaria and managed to catch the last train out before the Red Army rolled in. Her family wanted to stay, her father, a German geologist, was not involved with the military, but they warned him that nothing good awaited him there. Hilde fled with her Bulgarian mother and her younger brother. Her father stayed behind to finish up a few things on the house and was supposed to catch the train a week later. They shot him the next night . . . Hilde was nine. They traveled almost a whole week, the train was constantly being bombed. She remembered clearly the scent of grass and dirt as they lay beside the rails. She told us all this as we sat in her living room, which, for its part, had remained forever in the ’60s, with its floor lamp and worn armchairs with wooden armrests.