Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

I hated that I looked like Papa’s side of the family. My mother was so lovely, very fair, with beautiful curls and a mischievous smile. And as you can see, I am dark, and not at all beautiful. Mischlinge, cousin Minna called me, half-breed, although never in front of my grandparents: to Opa and Oma I was always beautiful, because I was their darling Lingerl’s daughter. It wasn’t until I came to live with Minna in England that I ever felt ugly.

What torments me is that I can’t recall my father’s sisters or their children at all. I shared a bed with five or maybe six cousins, and I can’t remember them, only that I hated not being in my own lovely white bedroom by myself. I remember kissing Oma and weeping, but I didn’t even say good-bye to Bobe.

You think I should remember I was only a child? No. Even a child has the capacity for human and humane behavior.

Each child was allowed one small suitcase for the train. Oma wanted us to take leather valises from her own luggage-those had not been of interest to the Nazis when they stole her silver and her jewels. But Opa was more practical and understood Hugo and I mustn’t attract attention by looking as though we came from a rich home. He found us cheap cardboard cases, which anyway were easier for young children to carry.

By the day the train left, Hugo and I had packed and repacked our few possessions many times, trying to decide what we couldn’t bear to live without. The night before we left, Opa took the dress I was going to wear on the train out to Oma. Everyone was asleep, except me: I was lying rigid with nervousness in the bed I shared with the other cousins. When Opa came in I watched him through slits in my closed eyes. When he tiptoed out with the dress, I slid out of bed and followed him to my grandmother’s side. Oma put a finger on her lips when she saw me and silently picked apart the waistband. She took four gold coins from the hem of her own skirt and stitched them into the waist, underneath the buttons.

“These are your security,” Opa said. “Tell no one, not Hugo, not Papa, not anyone. You won’t know when you will need them.” He and Oma didn’t want to cause friction in the family by letting them know they had a small emergency hoard. If the aunts and uncles knew Lingerl’s children were getting four precious gold coins-well, when people are frightened and living too close together, anything can happen.

The next thing I knew Papa was shaking me awake, giving me a cup of the weak tea we all drank for breakfast. Some adult had found enough canned milk for each child to get a tablespoon in it most mornings.

If I had realized I wouldn’t see any of them again-but it was hard enough to leave, to go to a strange country where we knew only cousin Minna, and only that she was a bitter woman who made all the children uncomfortable when she came to Kleinsee for her three-week holiday in the summers-if I’d known it was the last good-bye I wouldn’t have been able to bear-the leaving, or the next several years.

When the train left it was a cold April day, rain pouring in sheets across the Leopoldsgasse as we walked-not to the central station but a small suburban one that wouldn’t attract attention. Papa wore a long red scarf, which he put on so Hugo and I could spot him easily from the train. He was a café violinist, or had been, anyway, and when he saw us leaning out a window, he whipped out his violin and tried to play one of the Gypsy tunes he had taught us to dance to. Even Hugo could tell misery was making his hand quaver, and he howled at Papa to stop making such a noise.

“I will see you very soon,” Papa assured us. “Lottchen, you will find someone who needs a willing worker. I can do anything, remember that-wait tables, haul wood or coal, play in a hotel orchestra.”

As the train pulled away I held the back of Hugo’s jacket and the two of us leaned out the window with all the other children, waving until Papa’s red scarf had turned to an invisible speck in our own eyes.

We had the usual fears all Kindertransport children report as we traveled through Austria and Germany, of the guards who tried to frighten us, of the searches through our luggage, standing very still while they looked for any valuables: we were allowed a single ten-mark piece each. I thought my heart would be visible through my dress, it was beating so hard, but they didn’t feel my clothes, and the gold coins traveled with me safely. And then we passed out of Germany into Holland, and for the first time since the Anschluss we were suddenly surrounded by warm and welcoming adults, who showered us with bread and meat and chocolates.

I don’t remember much of the crossing. We had a calm sea, I think, but I was so nervous that my stomach was twisted in knots even without any serious waves. When we landed we looked around anxiously for Minna in the crowd of adults who had come to meet the boat, but all the children were claimed and we were left standing on the dock. Finally a woman from the refugee committee showed up: Minna had left instructions for us to be sent on to London by train, but she had delayed getting word to the refugee committee until that morning. We spent the night in the camp at Harwich with the other children who had no sponsors, and went on to London in the morning. When we got to the station, to Liverpool Street -it was massive, we clung to each other while engines belched and loudspeakers bellowed incomprehensible syllables and people brushed past us on important missions. I clutched Hugo’s hand tightly.

Cousin Minna had sent a workman to fetch us, giving him a photograph against which he anxiously studied our faces. He spoke English, which we didn’t understand at all, or Yiddish, which we didn’t understand well, but he was pleasant, bustling us into a cab, pointing out the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, giving us each a bit of queer paste-filled sandwich in case we were hungry after our long trip.

It was only when we got to that narrow old house in the north of London that we found out Minna would take me and not Hugo. The man from the factory settled us in a forbidding front room, where we sat without moving, so fearful we were of making a noise or being a nuisance. After some very long time, Minna swept in from work, full of anger, and announced that Hugo was to go on, that the foreman from the glove factory would be coming for him in an hour.

“One child and one child only. I told her highness Madame Butterfly that when she wrote begging for my charity. She may choose to roll around in the hay with a Gypsy but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to look after her children.”

I tried to protest, but she said she could throw me out on the street. “Better be grateful to me, you little mongrels. I spent all day persuading the foreman to take Hugo instead of sending him to the child welfare authorities.”

The foreman, Mr. Nussbaum his name was, actually turned out to be a good foster father to Hugo; he even set him up in business many years later. But you can only guess how the two of us felt that day when he arrived to take Hugo away with him: the last sight either of us had then of any familiar face of our childhood.

Like the Nazi guards, Minna searched my clothes for valuables: she refused to believe the penury to which the family was reduced. Fortunately, my Oma had been clever enough to evade both Nazis and Minna. Those gold coins helped pay my fees in medical school, but that was a long way ahead, in a future I didn’t imagine as I sobbed for my parents and my brother.

When I finally woke the next morning, my head was heavy with the detritus of dreams and difficult sleep. I once read that a year or eighteen months after losing them, you dream of your dead as they were in their prime. I suppose I must sometimes dream of my mother as she was in my childhood, vivid and intense, but last night she was dying, eyes heavy with morphine, face unrecognizable as disease had leached flesh from bone. Lotty and my mother are such intertwined strands in my mind that it was almost inevitable that her distress would overlay my sleep.