Flights of Love, page 17
Andi breathed a sigh of relief. When he told Sarah about the letter he had received that same day extending his fellowship and his study in New York for another year, she hugged him with tears of happiness in her eyes and called them all together. There were cheers and toasts, and the artist’s toast to Andi was especially cordial.
That evening, as Sarah and Andi talked about the party and the guests, Sarah couldn’t help remarking, “You’re such a trouper, why do you do battle for something that you don’t even approve of yourself? You don’t owe a thing to someone who tells rude ethnic jokes. About gassing or Jewish haste—they’re simply offensive.”
Andi didn’t know what to think. He remembered the American and English war films he’d seen as a boy. He had known that the Germans were justifiably presented as the villains, but had felt torn all the same. When it came to “Jewish haste” he didn’t even know if it was intended as a slur or was perhaps truly harmless.
In bed he asked her, “Do you love me?”
She sat up and laid a hand on his chest. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re sweet and clever, honest, generous. Because you’re such a trouper and make life so difficult for yourself. You want to make everything right for everybody, and although you manage a lot of things, you can’t do it all, how could you, but you try all the same, and that touches my heart. Because you’re good with children and dogs. Because I like your green eyes and your curly brown hair, and because my body likes yours.” She stopped and kissed him. She whispered, “No, it doesn’t just like yours. It needs yours.”
Later she said, “And you? Do you know why you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Yes.” He waited a long time before going on. Sarah thought he had fallen asleep. “I’ve never met a woman who sees so much, who looks at things with so much care and sympathy. I love you for that. I feel safe within your gaze. And I love you for the computer games you invent. You use your brain to make other people happy. You’ll be a wonderful mother. And you have . . . you know who you are, where you come from, where you’re going and what you need to make life work. I love you for the firm footing you have in the world. And you’re beautiful.” His hand traced the contours of her face, as if the room weren’t bright but dark and he could see nothing. “You have the blackest hair I’ve ever seen, and the cutest nose and the most exciting lips, you’re so sensual and so wise at the same time that I still can’t grasp it all.” He cuddled up against her. “Will that do?”
5
IN MAY, with the semester over, Sarah and Andi took a trip to Germany. They arrived in Düsseldorf before day-break and took the train to Heidelberg. As they were crossing the Rhine at Cologne, the cathedral and the museum sparkled in the light of the rising sun.
“Hey,” Sarah said, “that’s beautiful.”
“Yes, and it will get even more beautiful.” He loved the train trip along the Rhine, the winding river and the way the land sometimes curved down to the water and sometimes made a sheer drop, the vineyards and wooded slopes, the castles and small towns, the freighters moving fast downstream and working their way slowly in the opposite direction. He loved this stretch in the winter when steam rose from the river into the cold morning air and the sun fought its way through the fog, and in summer when the dollhouse world of castles, towns, trains, and cars on the far side of the river lay dependable in the bright light. He enjoyed the blossoms in spring, and the yellow and red foliage of fall.
The day was cloudless, and in the clear air under a blue sky what they saw was dollhouse Germany. With a child’s eagerness Andi showed it all to her: the tree-lined avenue of the castle at Brühl, Nonnenwerth Island, the Lorelei, and Castle Pfalz near Kaub. As the train wound its way down to the Rhine plain his heart was gripped with a melancholy homesickness. The wide plain, the mountains to the east and west, the red sandstone quarries as the train moved on from Mannheim toward Heidelberg—this was where he came from, where he belonged. He was taking Sarah there now. In Heidelberg he kept her distracted as the taxi drove through town and up to the hill on the far side of the river. They got out, walked to Philosophen Weg, and then he proudly laid his hometown at her feet: the castle and old city, the Old Bridge and the Neckar River, the high school where he had been a student, the Municipal Auditorium where he and another classmate had played a concerto for two flutes at their graduation ceremony, and the cafeteria where he had eaten as a college student. He talked and talked, trying to make it all interesting and familiar to her.
“Sweetheart,” she said, laying a finger to his lips, “sweetheart, you needn’t be afraid I won’t like your town. I see it and I can see little Andi going to school here and eating at the cafeteria, and I like it, and I love you.”
They arrived at his parents’ house just as his sister, her husband, and their two children drove up. A little later his uncles and aunts, his cousins, and a few family friends arrived. His parents had invited twenty guests for their “marble” wedding anniversary, as they called their fortieth. How easily Sarah moves in my family, he thought, how wonderfully she speaks with everyone in her mix of German and English, how fresh she looks, though she’s hardly slept. What a marvelous woman I’ve found!
Before lunch they were sitting with his father and brother-in-law.
“Where does your family come from?” Sarah asked his father.
“From Forst, on the other side of the Rhine plain. As far back as we can remember, we were vintners and innkeepers. I’m the first to break the chain. But to make up for it, my daughter has returned to making wine.”
“Didn’t you like the taste of the wine?”
His father laughed. “Oh yes. The wine tasted fine, and I was tempted to be a vintner. But before I could decide, I had to go off to war as a solider, and there I realized what fun it was to organize things, and so after being held prisoner of war I went into business. Besides, my cousin who had a bad leg and couldn’t go to war, had been running the vineyards for seven years, and I didn’t want to take that away from him. But I missed it. That’s also why I married so late. Getting married, but then not taking my wife to live in our vineyards—for a long time I couldn’t imagine it.”
“What did you organize in the war?”
“All sorts of things. In Russia, it was art. The Communists had turned the churches into warehouses, workshops, barns, and stalls, and we dug out the most wonderful icons, candelabra, and vestments from under the rubble and trash.”
“What happened to it all?”
“We inventoried them, packed them up, and sent them to Berlin. What happened to them in Berlin I don’t know. In terms of organization, France was more interesting, which was where I dealt with deliveries of grain and wine.”
“And Italy?”
“Italy?”
“Andi mentioned that you were a soldier in France, Russia, and Italy.”
“In Italy I was a kind of trade attaché to Mussolini’s last government.”
Andi listened in amazement. “You’ve never told me this much about the war.”
“I had to or she’d be mistrustful forever.” His father gave them a knowing, friendly look.
As Sarah and Andi lay in bed that evening, she got around to mentioning his father’s knowing, friendly look. He was a good-looking man, she said, with that striking head and close-cropped white hair, and in his face you could see his farming background so nicely joined with a sharp mind. But something about that look had unsettled her. “How does he know that I’m Jewish? Did you tell him?”
“No, but I also don’t know if that’s what he meant when he talked about mistrusting him forever. The way you asked things left no doubt you expected answers.”
“But what sort of answers did I get? What’s a German trade attaché doing with a Mussolini who exists only at the whim of the Germans? What does that mean, dealing with deliveries of grain and wine from France? It was all about war booty in France and in Russia, about pillaging and plundering.”
“Why didn’t you ask him?” But Andi was glad she hadn’t asked his father, that he hadn’t answered her or shown her the icon in his study.
“That’s why I’m talking about the look he gave me. It told me that he would have an answer for everything that would put me and my mistrust in the wrong, but would never tell me anything.”
Andi remembered arguments with his father that had left him feeling like that, too. At the same time he didn’t want to let his father be implicated in the charge of pillaging and plundering. “I believe him when he says those treasures from Russian churches would have been destroyed if he and his men hadn’t saved them.”
Sarah, who was lying on her back, raised her hands as if preparing for some fundamental statement. But she dropped them again. “Maybe. I don’t care about all that—the Russian icons, the French wine and grain, or trade with Mussolini. And as long as you don’t give me looks like your father’s, let him look any way he wants. Your mother is sweet, and I like your sister and her kids.” She gave it some thought. “And your father is a character, God knows.” She rolled over on her side and looked at Andi. “And that train trip was beautiful! And the view from the hill. Shall we walk down into town tomorrow? And make love now?”
6
THE FIRST time he felt afraid that the difference between the worlds they came from could threaten their love was in Berlin. They had been in Munich and Ulm, on Lake Constance, in the Black Forest, and in Freiburg, and Sarah had taken it all in with attentive, friendly eyes. She liked the landscape more than the cities, and made a place in her heart for the country on the edge of the Rhine plain that Andi loved—the Berg Strasse, the Ortenau region, the Markgräfler Land. They spent one entire day at the thermal baths in Baden-Baden. They entered through the separate doors for men and women, were rubbed down separately, sweated separately in dry Finnish and damp Roman heat, and then met again in the middle of the old building, in the bathing pool surrounded by columns beneath its high dome. Andi arrived before she did and was watching for her. He had never before seen her walking naked toward him for any distance. How beautiful she was—her shoulder-length black hair, her open face, the curve of her shoulders, her full breasts, soft hips, and beautifully shaped, if somewhat short, legs. How gracefully she moved—proud of her beauty and at the same time embarrassed by his candid inspection of her. How enchantingly she laughed, a teasing laugh—because she always knew to tease—that also delighted in his admiration and was full of love.
In the cities they visited she made fun of how you could depend on the Germans to remark on the destruction of the Second World War. “The war was fifty years ago. Are you so proud that in the end you’ve become the greatest nation in Europe after all?” When they drove through suburbs she made fun of the little white houses with their tidy yards and proper fences, and when they drove through the countryside, she made fun of how there was no trace of the rubbish, rusting cars, and moldy sofas you see scattered around little farms in America. “Everything here looks as if you’d just finished the job.” She made fun of the traffic markings, and kept calling Andi’s attention to how carefully a parking zone ended in a diagonally striped triangle and how an intersection was marked with stripes for turning traffic that crossed the stripes of cars moving in the other direction. “You should keep traffic off the streets and take aerial photographs— they’d be works of art, true works of art.”
Sarah laughed when she made fun of things, and her laugh invited him to make fun and laugh along with her. Andi noticed that. He also knew that for Sarah making fun of things was a way of making the world her own, and that she liked to make fun of things in New York as well—of the conductor, although she would rave about the concert afterward, of a kitschy movie, although she cried at the end and could turn misty-eyed the next day recalling it. She had even made fun of her brother’s bar mitzvah, but at the same time had shared his fears when he had to read aloud in the synagogue or make his speech at dinner about the Torah and his love of music. He knew all that, and yet he was having trouble with the way her mockery spared nothing. He laughed along with her, but his lips were tight and his cheek muscles clenched.
In Berlin they stayed in Grunewald with an uncle who had inherited a villa that contained a small apartment— with living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath—that he let them use. He invited them one evening to a dinner he cooked himself, but otherwise let them go their own way. On the evening before they were to go to Oranienburg, they ran into him at the front door.
“Oranienburg? What are you going to Oranienburg for?”
“To see what it was like.”
“What do you suppose it’s like? It’s the way you imagine it, but only because you imagine it that way. I was in Auschwitz a few years ago, and there’s nothing to see, I mean nothing at all. A couple of brick barracks, grass, and trees here and there—and that’s it. The rest is all in your head.” The uncle, a retired teacher, gave them a look of sympathetic dismay.
“Then we’ll see what we see in our heads,” Andi said with a laugh. “Shall we turn it into a problem of epistomology?”
The uncle shook his head. “What’s the point? That was fifty years ago. I don’t understand why we can’t let the past be. Why we can’t let it be the same way we let the rest of the past be?”
“Maybe because it’s a special past?” Sarah asked in English. To Andi’s surprise she had been following their conversation in German.
“A special past? Everyone has a past that’s special to him. But aside from that, it is we who make the past, in general and in particular.”
“Yes, the Germans made a particular past for my relatives.” Sarah gave Andi’s uncle a cold stare.
“Of course that was dreadful. But is that any reason why the people in Oranienburg or Dachau or Buchenwald have to have a dreadful present? People born long after the war and who’ve never done anybody any harm? Because the special past of their towns is remembered and forced upon them?” The uncle pulled his key from his coat pocket. “But what’s the point? Your friend is an American, and American tourists see Europe differently from the way we do. Are you going to the Italian restaurant on the corner? Enjoy your meal.”
Sarah said nothing until they had found a table and were seated. “You surely don’t agree with your uncle, do you?”
“In what way?”
“That we should let the past be, and that it would be left alone if the Jews didn’t stir things up.”
“Haven’t you been saying that the war was fifty years ago?”
“So you do agree.”
“No, I don’t agree with my uncle. Nor is it as simple as you make out.”
“How complicated is it?”
Andi was not in the mood to argue with Sarah. “Do we have to talk about this?”
“Just answer that one question.”
“How complicated is it? The past has to be remembered, so that it’s never repeated; it has to be remembered because the respect we owe the victims and their children demands it; both the Holocaust and the war were fifty years ago; whatever guilt fathers and sons of those generations brought upon themselves, the generation of their grandchildren has nothing to feel guilty about; anyone who has to admit outside of Germany that he’s from Oranienburg has it rough; teenagers become neo-Nazis because they’ve had enough of hearing about coming to terms with the past. And trying to deal with all of that doesn’t seem simple to me.”
Sarah was silent. The waiter came and they ordered. Sarah continued to be silent, and Andi saw that she was crying softly. “Hey,” he said, bending across the table to her and laying his arm around her neck, “you’re not crying because of us, are you?”
She shook her head. “I know you mean well. But it’s not complicated. What’s right is simple.”
7
ANDI DIDN’T dare tell her that he was experiencing Oranienburg just as his uncle had predicted. What he saw wasn’t shocking. What was shocking was what went on in his head. That was dreadful enough. Sarah and Andi walked mutely through the camp. After a while they were holding hands.
Also visiting the camp that day was a school class of about thirty twelve-year-old boys and girls. They behaved the way twelve-year-olds behave—they were loud, they giggled and sniggered. They were more interested in each other than in what the teacher was showing and explaining to them. What they saw was an opportunity to impress and embarrass one another, to get laughs. They played guards or prisoners and moaned in the cells as if they were being tortured or dying of thirst. The teacher did all he could, and it was apparent from what he said that he had amply prepared his students for the visit. But all his efforts got him nowhere.
Does Sarah see us the way we see these kids? There’s nothing wrong with kids behaving like kids, and yet I can’t tolerate them. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that Father discovered he liked organizing things during the war or that my uncle wants to be left in peace and that I differentiate complicated things into an “on the one hand” and “on the other.” And yet it drives her to despair. How would I feel if one of these kids were my own?
Andi was glad they didn’t encounter his uncle that evening. He was glad they would be touring the new eastern part of the city the next day, gathering new impressions. He had been working in Berlin when the wall came down and wanted to move back to Berlin and to awaken in Sarah his enthusiasm for the city. He was glad that he could show her all its many different facets—you’ll see, he had often told her, Berlin is almost like New York. But when he pictured to himself touring with her all the construction sites at Potsdamer Platz, on Friedrich Strasse, around the Reichstag, and just about everywhere, he knew what Sarah would say, or if not say, then think. Why must it all be finished by tomorrow and look as if the city has no history? As if it has no wounds and scars? And why does the Holocaust need to be encased and stored under a monument? He would try to explain, and what he would say wouldn’t be stupid or false, but to Sarah it would still sound strange.
