For weeks after I came to France—I arrived just before my tenth birthday—I would, walking on a street, lift my arm to my forehead and, after a second of contraction, drop it again. Nothing would have been easier than to extend that raised arm. My muscles, I felt, would respond with terrifying ease; but, in an inevitable trajectory, that arm would drop in a clumsy half-circle from my forehead back to my side. I wanted to make the Nazi salute on a street in provincial France, and dared not.

When I became a Nazi—insofar as this was possible for a Jewish girl of eight years, living in a profusion of fairy tales and rock candy—I had already been converted on numerous occasions. This innate desire to take for myself and share whatever seemed most important in someone else’s life ranged all the way from a treacherous admiration for wooden coffee mills—our own was made of glass and china—to a yearning to go to the park and sit, on sunny Sunday afternoons, with the shoemaker’s family on the crowded green lawn. But most of all, I wanted my friends’ religion. In that I achieved quite a measure of consistency. Because my best friend, the shoemaker’s daughter, was Protestant, I once found the courage to declare to a group of the Catholic relatives of our maid that, in spite of them, I should become a Protestant and not a Catholic. And somewhere I even heard a strange, dimly muttered approval from someone’s aunt. I was right, she must have declared, because look at poor Erna . . . she became a Catholic and never could quite understand it herself.

Protestantism, however, was associated only with a long red church (rather apart from the streets that I liked), a glossy textbook which Lottel had shown me, and with the sailor suit she wore on Sunday mornings when I could not play with her. But Nazism brought dolls and flags, hundreds of brightly-colored insignia that sold at street comers-only in school could one get the more stable, hexagonal swastikas—parades, salutes, and marching songs. Nazism belonged to our teacher who had us write narratives of old German mythology. To the young music teacher also. He wore a uniform, grabbed me by the back of the neck, and called me Marianne. It also seemed the special privilege of two little uniformed boys in our class, and of a girl named Isabel.

I could never precisely recall what my relations with Isabel were—two facts only have remained. The first one does not trouble me. Even if a careful search of our trunks and boxes should not yield the little blue book where all my classmates signed their names along with some verse or wish for the future, I still could see Isabel’s small handwriting at the top of a page that then stayed blank, and discern, in the declaration from Hitler that she had copied down, the words, “Iron hopes and holy anger.” Bright words. And there is brightness and white light also in the other memory, but all I can see (on the wide avenue close to the stationer’s and the baker’s shop) is Isabel’s back in a grey coat-just as if I were peering at her from the comer of our own leafy and tawny street, not standing, as I should, in front of Isabel, and watching her speak (maybe words like the ones she wrote in my book—but suddenly I feel that it must have been something like, “No, you cannot be a Nazi, too”) or salute, flashing down at me, for a second, immeasurable tallness and cold splendor. Lottel was standing apart. She may have become a friend of Isabel.

_____________

 

With Lottel, and with pennies hoarded from my daily allotment for chocolate milk at the ten o’clock recreation, I founded the treasure. That was after we (my grandmother, Kaga the maid, my brother, and I) had moved from the house where Lottel’s father was shoemaker and janitor, and from the street with the chestnut trees, into a large old apartment house that my grandmother owned in the center of the city. The house had a terrible, dark, catacomb of a corridor which led to the back stairs—and those we had to use—and an old wild garden. The garden where we had lived before was light (the only dark spot was a heap of cool wet playing sand in a corner) with a wide lawn and two small hills that, of themselves, created most of our games. The city garden had no such light or logic. A small side area with a paved walk, a brick wall, squares of radish that we had planted, and some always unexpected, never plentiful strawberries, were all that had been humanized. The rest was thick, translucent weeds; the soil between their roots was heavy and black. On the uncut lawn there were dry and long grasses around a thin pear tree with three large green pears that could never ripen for fear some one might take them. In the back, huge broken chestnut trees.

In one of the adjoining gardens there once appeared a boy (I fell in love with him when he told me he was going to Palestine the next day, and hated him when I found out that he had not left—he laughed at me) and in the other garden—it was stony and narrow—lived a girl named Brunhilde. She terrified me, for her hair was sickeningly yellow, her skin very white, and her father, a gardener, was said to be seventy years old. I once hit her when she said in the street that my mother, who had been away for more than a year, went to China only to avoid being sent to prison. She lived in a sort of basement, and put sugar on her buttered rye bread. That too was hideous, and made me run away.

I do not think Brunhilde ever knew about the treasure. It was located in the hollow made by an unused cellar door and the step that went down to it from the garden. We covered it with a wooden board. There we placed a corkscrew with an ivory handle, a bottle of red ink stolen from my brother, some large matches with blue and yellow heads. Moreover, by cautious maneuvers, I had approached a girl in class who, for some mysterious reason, sold paper pads, and finally bought two of them.

We visited the treasure once every week-on the day Lottel came home from school with me and stayed until evening. We lit a fire with dry leaves in the back of the garden. Once we took some sheets from the pad, some matches, and, with the red ink, painted large swastikas on them. There was a staircase running down into the garden from a porch behind which lived two inimical old maids. We placed the painted sheets on that staircase. I wonder whether there was a complaint and whether I lied. After all, a Nazi youth group used the garden once a week for meetings. Then the garden door was locked. But our chief desire was to buy a knife for the treasure—a folding knife with a red handle. That, we could never do. And the ivory corkscrew was purely ornamental.

_____________

 

In The house (upstairs) I openly read old German legends, and once brought home a photograph of Hitler to put on my wall. I said it was a handsome photograph. My grandmother objected on the grounds that, on your wall, you should only have pictures of people that you love. I said I did love Hitler, although I remember that, in the private accounting and classifying of loves that I held in bed before falling asleep, he usually occupied a place at the bottom of the list. But he was included. My grandmother rather avoided speaking of him. As for Kaga, she would wonder aloud why, with all the power he had, Hitler did not give himself some nice respectable title—duke or prince. I had not bought that photograph, however. It had been handed to me—and to every child in school—along with a bun, a sausage, and an apple. Hitler was visiting the city.

I used to think that I had been a hypocrite for the first time—not just told some small premeditated lie, but briefly and completely concealed my emotion—on a day, not long after that, when, walking on the Boulevard des Brosses, mother told me that I had not come to France for the Easter vacation only, that I would never go back to Germany. I now believe that I laughed and laughed, and told mother—secure that this was only a nice compliment—how good it would be to remain with her in France, and that my laughter just continued for a second more, carrying me over the first pain.

After a few weeks, I no longer tried to make Nazi salutes in the street. I forgot about the treasure and the red swastikas-or, rather, they became the hidden core around which less direct memories formed: blue candles sold in winter for the benefit of Germans living abroad, harvest-thanksgiving parades, songs that had been sung when we marched from school to the park while I was out of step. Anyway, I had a new conversion, and could soon cross myself nimbly, though perhaps in the wrong direction. Besides, I became a girl-scout with a uniform—it also happened to be brown—and I could raise my three fingers in salute.

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link