Necessary Lies(77)
“My daughter can never understand,” Frau Strauss says with mock exasperation, “But what can be expected? She was born in Berlin.”
This must be an old family joke, for Monika smiles and pats her mother’s hand.
“Do you know this?” Frau Strauss breaks into a song, a joyful, vivid rhyme, from which Anna can only understand one word, Liebe.
“Silesian lieder,” she says. “You know them, don’t you.” The song sounds lively, cheeky almost. Frau Strauss’s lips twist mischievously, and Anna smiles, amused. K?the could have sung such songs, but K?the never speaks of the past. “What’s gone is gone,” is all she has ever said in response to Anna’s curiosity. “I want nothing from there.”
Frau Strauss points to the photograph with St. Dorothy’s church and the Monopol Hotel, its art nouveau windows gleaming in the sun.
“Here,” she says, pointing to the hotel. “I danced. At my wedding. We were married in Dorotheenkirche.” She is smiling at the memory. “When I tried to talk to K?the about Breslau, she would call me a silly goose. ’It was just a city,’ she said. ’What you miss is your Johann, she kept teasing me. The way he looked at you then.”
“The hotel is still there,” Anna says, softly. “You can still see it.”
“No,” Frau Strauss says, the liveliness in her voice dying away. “I don’t want to see how it has changed. What you don’t know doesn’t hurt you, nicht wahr?”
She is silent for a while, before she turns to Anna, fixing her eyes on hers. “You understand?” she asks and waits for Anna to answer.
“Yes,” Anna says. “I do.”
Frau Strauss smoothes the lace tablecloth, straightening the starched pattern with her hand. Her voice swerves a bit, falters, and she switches back into German, letting Monika translate.
“We were good friends with K?the. Good, good friends. She — Ulrike, K?the, and Mitzi. We went to school together, rode horses. My Vati was a doctor. He kept such beautiful Arabians in Breslau. ’Look at the curve of their necks,’ he kept telling me. He said they moved like dancers, but they were bred for swiftness and endurance of desert treks.”
Frau Strauss points to a photograph in a small, leather-bound album. K?the is there, her hair tied at the back. The frills of her white blouse are freshly ironed. In the corner, in old German script, an inscription Frau Strauss translates: “To my best friend, Ulrike. With loving thoughts, K?the Herzmann.” The photograph was taken in the atelier of the Barasch brothers, the stamp on the back of the picture says.
“We were so silly then. So very young. K?the and Mitzi were good at German composition and at sports. I was good at mathematics, but sports was more important then. Even the nuns thought so. Gemeinschaft. You know that word, nein? The feeling of being together. The trips the young people made into the mountains, into the woods, in groups, together,... picnics on the meadows. The songs. Having something to live for. Having ideals.
“The three of us, how we laughed. Mitzi’s father had a clothing store, on Gartenstrasse, in Breslau. He had a black Chrysler and a driver in uniform who would take us for drives to Krummhübl, to the Scheitniger Park. We leaned out of the window, to feel the wind in our hair. We liked to skate together, too, on the frozen moat by Liebichsh?he. The officers used to come there. So tall and handsome in their uniforms, polished boots. We thought they were like gods.
“How little life means ... be ready at any hour, they sang. We didn’t know any better,” Frau Strauss says, softly. “It was still before the war! Before it all went so very, very wrong.”
The photographs of Breslau spread on the table may account for the ease with which Anna imagines K?the and Ulrike together. Young girls dreaming of caresses. Of strong arms that could defy danger. Sneaking glances at the muscular thighs of German heroes, at their stone penises. Giggling at the erect neck of a swan settling between Leda’s legs. Walking hand in hand, swinging their purses, aware of admiring looks of passing soldiers.
“Is that when K?the met William’s father?” Anna asks.
“Helmut?” Frau Strauss says and nods.
Helmut. Helmut Rust. In Anna’s mind, William’s father begins his existence as a shining torso of a demigod, beautiful in his iron, unmoveable presence.
“It was Mitzi’s brother, Bernd who brought Helmut over. My Johann was drafted then, and I missed him so much. Helmut and Bernd were both in uniforms. Tall, ramrod straight. So handsome. So very handsome.”
In Frau Strauss’s story the invasion of Poland is called the Polish Campaign. “The summer before the Polish Campaign,” she says. The time when Willi was conceived. “Oh, Mitzi had her eye on Helmut, but she didn’t want to stand in K?the’s way. They even broke up for a while, until Mitzi went to the Baltic sea, for her holidays and wrote to K?the wishing her and Helmut all the best. Wrote such a funny postcard. About sailors who sway their hips when they walk. Asking K?the if Helmut was everything she had wished for.”
The summer of 1939, filled with incessant talk on the radio about the Polish corridor, the indignities suffered by the Volk. Such a hot summer, unusually beautiful. K?the and Helmut together among the yarrow, blue chicory, mugworth, shepherd’s purse. It just happened. They were young. They were in love. He was to leave soon.
“Did they have time to get married? Do you have his picture?” Anna asks. She is curious to see if she could spot William’s shadow in his father’s face. “What did her parents say?”