I Can't Come to You, Berta: I Am Where I Lost Your Voice

Rastinews — My body is a mass of stone ready to crumble. I stand in the square, in the loneliness of towering buildings, staring at your motionless window.

My fingers have lost count of how many times they've pressed your doorbell. That day you taught me, through pain, that even a single voice can matter this much, Berta. Shame on you — just say "jaa" once, Berta... Just once, even a whisper would have been enough...

There — a woman comes to collect her newspaper from the mailbox, the door opens. So many elevator numbers, such a long way now: one, two, three, eleven, fourteen... This is the ghetto.

Yours is a shut door, Berta, a door that gives no sound. Open it, Berta, go on, open it? Take me in your arms and kiss my cheek three times, Berta! Open it, open it, open this damned coffin... BERTA...

Forty-five minutes, the war is over, come out of hiding, Berta, while the ruins wait for you... Now you are free — are you free now? Now I am there, in the place where I lost your voice. Kiss me three times, Berta!

All this time I have been wiping a pane of clear glass to reach you. Where to begin, on this atlas of massacres — the 16th century, the 17th, the 19th. My mother dressed me in a long gown, its train sweeping the floor, my feet bare. 1894, 1921, 1930 — I am covered in blood. Fearing I would forget if I washed my dress, my mother even stitched it into my flesh. Yet I had never known a Jew before. Who would believe me if I said a pane of glass brought us together — me on one side, you on the other, a huge loaf of stone bread in your hand. And this too was our trouble: hunger.

Forty-five minutes...

Your windows too have been fouled, Berta. You are in a brown house, afraid. Kiss me three times and hold me — let your hands leave their mark on my dress. Berta, I have come from very far away; I even counted my steps: fifteen... thirty-eight...

Here I am. I have reached you.

I am where I found your voice, Berta. Open your door, hold me, and kiss me three times, Berta.

Your house was dark, every window browned by cigarette smoke, starved of outside air. The first thing to catch the eye in that house was your clocks. I counted them while you made coffee — eighty-seven, the same as your age, not counting the ones that would later turn up in your drawers and cupboards. "Time," you would say. "Time — every minute of it is essential."

Then that family photograph — the first thing to meet my eyes as I stepped through the door.

"This is my grandfather, this is my grandmother, this is my uncle, this is my aunt. Look, this little one — the baby in my grandmother's arms — is my mother. Alas, none of them are alive anymore."

Your grandfather looks into the camera, imposing and just as proud — his uniform, seen from above, a field of medals. He had been a general in the First World War, his hands, face, arms, and legs all intact. Each of his medals stands for dozens of dead soldiers, for how many shattered families; every one of those roads of mourning weeps beneath these medals. Tell me, Berta, why do the men behind the front lines always live so much longer? Your grandmother is smothered in a fur collar, tucked under the general grandfather's arm like a docile cat, as if to say, "This general — this general is mine alone. He belongs to me." Ah, how pitiful.

The children are a symbol of innocence, unaware of what is to come. If only those clocks had not dragged these people into savagery. I know you are sad and tired, but this was not your war. Hold me.

Kiss me three times, Berta. Tell me, "This is our Jewish tradition." My dress is stitched into my flesh, and now it hurts.

Kiss me, Berta, kiss me!

Frankfurt — today a grand, crowded industrial city, host to decisions that shape the world — was once our city. My mother was a beautiful woman, a general's daughter; my father was an architect who would build warm, beautiful houses. Both were madly in love, both were Jewish, and nothing stood in the way of their marriage. My uncle was single, my aunt married. We had a house with a huge garden and a German shepherd dog, and I still walk through that garden, as if through a magic tale my grandmother told me every day. My grandfather's war stories of heroism, my father's smile hidden beneath his breath as he listened to my grandfather — my father was a revolutionary, opposed to Hitler's then-rising party, and my mother, influenced by him, opposed it too. They sensed the danger closing in, but what could be done? My grandfather would not be convinced. Counting his medals, he would only say, "I fought for this homeland. They can't do anything to me," and nothing more.

But every day Jews and dissidents were loaded onto train cars and taken to an unknown fate, and it was then that they all fled together to the Netherlands. "I remember nothing — I was two."

Like water breaking through a dam, the SS armies advanced all the way to the Netherlands. In the end, the family made a decision: with no other choice, they would go to England. But my father did not want to leave — he chose to stay and fight the fascists. They stayed with a revolutionary family.

Berta, you save your cigarette ash, filling an empty cigarette box with it. Berta, you live behind closed doors, you don't even open your windows. The only sound in this house is the ticking of clocks, and the cuckoo clock that cries out on the hour. There is a hollow in your bed, and the television is always tuned to the news. One afternoon I brought you marigolds, and a little garden grew on your balcony, and you kissed me three times. I won't be able to come to you, Berta — and now, sadly, I've lost your voice too.

I keep saying ashes, Berta, ashes... My dress, stitched into my flesh — you are in pain, Berta. I am in pain.

One afternoon the SS pounded on the door. The woman of the house took you to her breast, nursed you, tried to lull you to sleep, and said, "This is my daughter." I could say you were luckier than Anne Frank there, but you would answer, "I died every day." Your mother and father, meanwhile, were forced with rifle butts onto those death trains bound for Auschwitz.

Whatever you lived through in that house until you were seven, it was all a faded memory.

Kiss me three times, Berta, then rise and hold me.

Then, Berta, when Georgy Zhukov told Hitler in Berlin, "This far and no further," what remained in your hands was a shattered family. Your grandfather had died of grief in England, medals and all. Your aunt and uncle stayed in England, and you never saw them again. But your grandmother came back years later, for you alone.

Ashes, Berta, I keep saying ashes — you never emptied that cigarette ash into an ashtray. Because those ashes were your father, your father who was burned to ash at Auschwitz.

Was your mother a living corpse, or a woman driven out of her mind? A baby in her arms — was she a Nazi officer's woman at Auschwitz, or merely his obedient slave?

Your hands are so cold — you were always cold, Berta. Wake up. Wake up and kiss me three times, Berta.

(To be continued)