Or there may be another agenda, another nuance to the guilt Roz is supposed to feel, and does feel, over the kaput plants, because Mitch wanted a swinnning pool instead of a sun room, so he could dive into a chlorine purification bath and sterilize his chest hair and kill whatever athlete’s foot and crotch fungus and tongue rot he may have picked up from plucking the ripening floozies; but Roz said an outdoor swimming pool’ was ridiculous in Canada, two months of swelter and ten of freeze-your-buns-off, and she refused to have an indoor one because she knew people who did and their houses smelled like gas refineries on a hot day because of all the chemicals, and there would be complicated machinery that would break down and that Roz would somehow be responsible for getting fixed. The worst thing about swimming pools as far as Roz is concerned is that they are one step too close to the great outdoors. Wildlife falls into them. Ants, moths, and such. Like the lake at summer camp, she’d be flailing along and suddenly there would be a bug, right at nose level. Swimming, in Roz’s opinion, is a major health hazard.
Zenia laughs and says she couldn’t agree more, and Roz talks on, because she’s nervous at seeing Zenia again after all these years, she remembers the reputation, the aura of green poison that encircled Zenia, the invisible incandescence, touch her and you’d get burned; and she remembers history, the stories of Tony and Charis. So she has to step carefully here, it’s no wonder she’s nervous, and when she’s nervous she talks. Talks; and also eats, and also drinks. Zenia takes one olive and chews it daintily, Roz gobbles the lot, and touches up Zenia’s martini, and pours herself another, and offers a cigarette, words pouring out of her like ink from a squid. Camouflage. She’s relieved to note that Zenia smokes. It would be intolerable if she were thin and well-dressed and unwrinkled and a knockout, and a nonsmoker as well.
“So,” says Roz, when she’s made a sufficient fool of herself to consider the ice broken. “My father.” Because this is what she wants, this is the point of the visit. Isn’t it?
“Yes,” says Zenia. She leans forward and sets down her glass, and rests her chin thoughtfully on one hand and frowns slightly. “I was only a baby, of course. So I have no real memories of that time. But my aunt always talked about your father, before she died. About how he got us out. I guess if it weren’t for him I’d just be ashes now.
“It was in Berlin. That’s where my parents lived, in a good neighbourhood, in a respectable apartment—it was one of those old Berlin buildings with the mosaic tiles in the front hall and the oblong staircase with the wooden banister, and the maid’s room and the back balcony overlooking a courtyard, for hanging out the wash. I know, because I saw it—I went back. I was there in the late seventies, I had an assignment in Berlin—the Berlin nightlife, for some travel magazine, you know the sort of thing, sexy cabaret, kinky strip clubs, telephones on the tables. So I took the afternoon off and I found it. I had the address, from some old papers of my aunt’s. The buildings all around were newer, they’d been rebuilt after the bombing, the whole place was practically levelled; it was amazing, but that one old building was still there.
“I rang all the buzzers and someone opened the door, and 1 went in and up the stairs, just as my parents must have done hundreds of times. I touched the same banister, I turned the same corners. I knocked at the door, and when it opened 1 said some relatives of mine had once lived there and could I look around—I speak a little German, because of my aunt, though my accent’s old-fashioned—and the people let me in. They were a young couple with a baby, they were very nice, but I couldn’t stay long. I really couldn’t stand it, the rooms, the light coming through the windows ... they were the same rooms, it was the same light. I think my parents became real to me for the first time. Everything, all of it became real. Before that, it was just a bad story.”
Zenia stops talking. This is what people often do when they come to the hard part, Roz has discovered. “A bad story,” she prompts.
“Yes,” says Zenia. “It was already the war. Things were in short supply. My aunt had never married, there was such a shortage of men after the first war a lot of women couldn’t, so she thought of our family as her family too, and she used to do things for us. Mother us—that’s how she put it. So on this one day, my aunt was going to my parents’ apartment; she was taking them some bread she’d baked. She went up the stairs as usual—there was a lift, one of those lifts like an iron cage, I saw it—but it was out of order. As she was about to knock, the door on the other side of the landing opened and the woman who lived there—my aunt knew her only by sight—this woman came out and grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her inside. ‘Don’t go in, don’t try to go in there,’ she said. ‘They’ve been taken away’
“‘Taken, where?’ said my aunt. She didn’t ask who by, she. didn’t need to ask that.
“‘Don’t try to find out,’ said the woman. ‘Better not: She had me in there with her because my mother had seen them coming, she’d looked out the window and she’d seen them coming along the street, and then when they’d turned in at the doorway and started up the stairs she’d guessed where they were headed and she’d runi out the back door, the maid’s door, and along the back balcony, with me wrapped up in a shawl—the balconies at the back adjoined one another—and she’d pounded at this woman’s kitchen door, and the woman had taken me in. It happened so fast she hardly knew what she was doing, and most likely if she’d had time to think she never would have done anything so dangerous. She was just an ordinary woman, obedient and so on, but I suppose if someone shoves a baby at you, you can’t just step back and let it fall to the ground.
“I was the only one saved, the others were all taken. I had an older brother, and an older sister too. I was much younger, I was a late baby. I have their picture; it’s something my aunt brought with her. See—” Zenia opens her purse, then her wallet, and slides out a snapshot. It’s a square picture with—a wide white border, the figures tiny and fading: a family group, father, mother, two young children, and another older woman, off to one side. The aunt, Roz assumes. Both of the children are ‘blond.
What amazes Roz is how contemporary they look: the knee-high skirts on the women, from the late twenties? the early thirties?—the smart hats, the makeup, it could be the retro look, in some fashion magazine, right now. Only the clothes of the children are archaic; that, and their haircuts. A suit and tie and short back and sides for the boy, and a fussy dress and ringlets for the girl. The smiles are a little tight, but smiles were, in those days. They are dress-up smiles. It must have been a special occasion: a vacation, a religious holiday, somebody’s birthday.
“That was before the war,” says Zenia. “It was before things got really bad. I was never part of that world. I was born right after the war started; I was a war baby. Anyway, that’s all I have, this picture. It’s all that’s left of them. My aunt searched, after the war. There was nothing left:” She slides the photo carefully back into her wallet.
“What about the aunt?” says Roz. “Why didn’t they take her, too?”
“She wasn’t Jewish,” says Zenia. “She was my father’s sister. My father wasn’t Jewish either, but after the Nuremberg laws were passed he was treated as one, because he was married to one. Hell, even my mother wasn’t Jewish! Not by religion. She was Catholic, as a matter of fact. But two of her four grandparents were Jewish, so she was classified as a mischling, first degree. A mixture. Did you know they had degrees?”