It was Bibi who saw me into the clinic where Roma was born. Julius was in Belgium. I asked Bibi to send him a telegram concerning the baby’s name. “I want Roma because that was where she was conceived,” I told her. “Don’t put ‘conceived’ in the telegram. Julius will understand.”
She nodded and said something in her ridiculous accent and went out the door. In a sense I never saw her again; I mean that this was the last I saw of a certain young, good-hearted Bibi. Julius came back before receiving the telegram; perhaps she hadn’t sent it. It was two days before I remembered to ask about Bibi, and another before she was found. She had taken gardénal. She was alive, but she had been in a long, untended coma. The flesh on her legs had begun to alter, and she had to stay for a long time in the hospital — the hospital where Roma was born — after her skin-graft operations. That was why she wore thick stockings forever after, even in summer.
No one told me, at first. Julius made up a story. He said Bibi had met a young engineer and had run away with him. It sounded unlike her, but it was also unlike him to be so inventive, so I thought it must be true. I sat up against a starched pillowcase Bibi had brought me from home, and I invited Julius to admire Roma’s hands and feet. He said that Bibi’s lover was named Wolfgang, and we laughed and thought of Bibi on her wedding night saying, “Wolfgang, you swine!”
All Bibi was ever able to explain to me later was that somewhere between my room and the front door of the hospital she had asked God to strike her with lightning. She stood still and counted up to ten; ten seconds was the limit she gave Him to prove He could hear. Nothing happened. She saw a rubbery begonia on a windowsill; an aide pushing along a trolley of tea mugs; a father and two children waiting on a bench with the patience of the ignorant. She could not recall whether or not she had ever sent the telegram. She next remembered being at home, in the room Julius had insisted would be in keeping with her new position, and that there she had taken gardénal. The gardénal was in the form of large flat tablets, like salt pills. She said she had “always” had them, even in her refugee camp. For someone who had access to every sort of modern poison at Possner, she had chosen an old-fashioned, feminine way of death. She broke up the tablets patiently, one after the other, sitting on the edge of her bed. She was obliged to swallow so much water that she began to be sick on it, and finally she heated a little milk on the gas ring. The milk probably saved her.
She had imagined dying would be like a slow anesthetic; she thought death could be inhaled, like fresh air. But it was a black cloak being blown down on one, she told me — like a cape slipping off a hook and falling in soft folds over your hands and face.
By the time Bibi was well enough to tell me these things, Julius had forgotten her, and had all but forgotten me. He was in love with no one but Roma, a baby ten days old, named for a holiday. This was a quiet love affair that gave us all a period of relative peace. I don’t believe he visited Bibi once, though he paid for her private room, the skin-graft operations, and her long convalescence. Bibi begged to be put in a ward, for being alone made her feel miserable, but Julius refused. She finally came home to us, because I needed someone; my health had broken down. I had fits of crying so prolonged that my eyelids became allergic to daylight and I had to spend hours lying down in the dark. Bibi worked part-time at Possner, looked after Roma, ran the house, and saw that I was allowed to recover very, very slowly.
Julius was now a major, and we moved into the first of our new, beautiful homes. We had a room for Bibi, next to Roma’s. She kept that room for ten years and never once made a change in it. She would not admit any furniture except a bed, a wardrobe, a small bookcase that served as her night table, and a lamp. She did not correspond with anyone. Her books, concerned with one subject, were called Tetrahedron Letters, The Chemistry of Steroids, Steroid Reactions, and so on. I tried to read her thesis but I could not take in “… washed repeatedly in a solution of bicarbonate of soda, then in distilled water, and dried on sulphate of sodium. After evaporation, a residue of 8.78 …” I discovered that she kept a journal, but it told me nothing. “Monday — Conversation with Arab student in canteen. Interesting.” “Tuesday—Funtumia latifolia is a tree in Western Africa. Flowers white. Wood white. Used for matches, fruit crates.” “Wednesday — Heidi dead.” “Thursday — Roma draws Papa, Mama, Aunt Bibi, self, a tombstone for Heidi. Accept drawing as gift.” “Friday — Menses.” “Saturday — Allied powers forbid demonstration against rearmament.” “Sunday — Visit kennel. New puppy for Roma. Roma undecided.” This was Bibi’s journal in a typical week.
Bibi had no sense of beauty. It was impossible to make her room attractive or interesting, and I avoided showing it to strangers. She never left a towel or a toothbrush in the bathroom she and Roma shared. I sometimes wondered if she had been raised in an orphanage, where every other bed held a potential thief. All her life she used only the smallest amount of water. At first, when she washed dishes I could never persuade her to rinse them. Water was something to be rationed, but I never learned why. She could keep a cake of soap or a tube of toothpaste for months. She wanted to live owning nothing, using nothing. On the other hand, once an object had come into her hands, and if she did not give it away immediately, to be parted from it later on was anguish. Sometimes I took her handbag and dumped it upside down. I would get rid of the broken comb, the thumbed mirror, the pencil stubs, and replace all this rubbish with something clean and new. But she was miserable until everything became old, cracked, and “hers” again. Most refugees talked too much. Bibi said too little, and that in disturbing fragments. Drink went straight to her head. At our parties I looked out for her, and when I saw the bad signs — her eyes pressed to slits, her head thrown back, a trusting smile — I would take her glass away. Once, during a dinner party, her voice floated over the rest of the talk: “Some adolescents, under difficult circumstances, were instructed in algebra and physics by distinguished professors. A gypsy girl named Angela, who had been in a concentration camp, was taught to read and write by a woman doctor of philosophy whose husband had been shot in the cellar of a prison in Moscow in 1941.”
After that, I came to a quiet agreement with Julius that Bibi be given nothing to drink except when we were alone. I could not expect Julius’s guests to abandon their own homes and their own television to hear nothing but disjointed anecdotes. This was the year when every television network celebrated the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Roma sat on a low stool with her elbows on her knees and saw everything. We now had a fifth person in the family, a young man from Possner named Michael. Julius had brought him in. Michael must already have decided to marry Julius’s daughter if only he could remain important to Julius while Roma was growing up. I noticed that he thought Aunt Bibi was also someone who had to be pleased. In a way, Michael was a new kind of Bibi. The firm intended to send him to an advanced course in business management, just as Bibi had been sent to the university.