Have You Seen Luis Velez?(80)

So he said, “Good thing you got out when you did. Because things got bad there after you left.”

“Yes, my young friend. That is the understatement of a lifetime. Things got very bad after we left.”

“Especially if your family was Jewish.”

He had been afraid to say it. So he watched her face to see how it would land. She only smiled sadly.

“It’s a funny thing about that. We were and we were not. My father was not Jewish. My mother was. In the Jewish religion, it is the mother who confers Judaism on the children, so in that sense, yes. We were. But from a more secular viewpoint . . . in the eyes of the society we grew up in . . . my brothers and sister and I, we were half of this thing that it was so dangerous to be. And now I feel bad because I did not tell you this sooner, because it’s a thing we have in common. We both know a strange truth about the world: that people judge you by your most controversial half. If you meet a person, Raymond, who is prejudiced, this person will not think to himself, ‘This Raymond has a white half, and I will respect that half of him.’ People judge you only by the half they don’t like. If my family had stayed in Germany, they would not have put half of me in a camp or sent half of me to the gas chamber. No. I would have been completely killed.”

A seagull landed on the pavement in front of Raymond and stared at him, wiggling closer. As if fascinated by their words, it seemed to him, but he knew it wasn’t that. Hoping for food, most likely.

He waved his hand and the bird flapped away.

“How did your family get out?” he asked after a time. “Wasn’t it hard to get out?”

“Ah,” she said. “Now we move closer to my shame.”

A sudden memory flooded into Raymond’s head. A time when she had told him that guilt can tear a person apart—told him as though she knew from personal experience. She had done something to bring herself guilt, and a shame that still had not left her alone all these decades later. He could only wait, frozen, to hear what it had been.

“My father was not a rich man, but he was a businessman, and the family did well enough. He owned a haberdashery, and business had been fairly good until the neighbors began to whisper that his wife was a Jewess. Then things fell apart, and he had to shutter the shop because of serial vandalism. But he had a little money put aside. Really it was our whole life savings for our whole family. I won’t tell you how much it was in German marks, because that will not help you picture the sum. The exchange rate is constantly changing, and of course inflation. If it were in American dollars, and if it were today, I would have to say it was a sum in the neighborhood of maybe fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. He used the vast majority of it to bribe an official. Simple as that. He had this money in cash, and he put it in the pocket of a corrupt official, and the next thing you know, we were steaming across the ocean to start all over again from nothing.”

“Okay . . . ,” Raymond said. He was waiting for the part that caused her guilt and shame. But he had no intention of hurrying her there. “So you came all the way across the Atlantic on a boat. I thought maybe you were afraid of boats.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I asked you if you wanted to take the ferry over to Ellis Island, and you had a very strong ‘no’ reaction.”

“Oh, but not because of the ferry. It’s the island itself. It was so frightening to me. Even my parents were frightened. I could see it and feel it. The officials herded us through that immigration building like cattle. And they had so much power over us. We were so helpless. No, that was bad. Earlier, when we came into the harbor, we all came to the railing of the ship to see the statue, and that was a very good and heady feeling. We were experiencing the country itself, and the promise of what it might have in store for us. But it’s different when you have to deal with the officials of the government of that country. I never want to set foot on that island again.”

“So . . . ,” Raymond said.

“So?”

“There’s something in all this that you think is shameful, and that you never even told Luis. But I’m not hearing it.”

“Well. It may be hard for you to understand, Raymond. But I need you to understand it, so try very hard to put yourself in my shoes. We paid off a corrupt official and left everybody else behind. All my friends from school. All my friends from school were Jewish, because we weren’t allowed to mix with the non-Jewish population as time went on. My grandparents. All my extended family. We just left them there. We ran away and left them all behind.”

“You were eleven.”

“Yes. I was eleven.”

“You had no control over any of this.”

“No.”

“This is what you feel shame about? You couldn’t have done anything! What could you have done?”

Mrs. G sighed deeply. She looked out across the harbor as though there were something out there for her to see. But maybe she was only hearing and smelling.

“Seven years go by, and of course you know the war ended in ’45. My parents had been following the news, but trying to keep it from me and my siblings as much as was possible. But you hear things. After the war, my father, I think he would have been satisfied leaving the past alone. He did not care to know too much. But not my mother. My mother wrote letters to everyone. Every single person we knew in Germany whose address she had noted in her book. Jews and non-Jews alike. She wrote to every one. Guess how many letters she got back?”