he said nothing for minutes—hours! Had he not heard her?
I hung in time, a dead man.
Then the manager’s brusque voice said: Huh? What’s that?
And Dr. Schussler replied: I said, is the room to be leased?
He coughed—another delay!—and finally said, The engineers in 805 are thinking of expanding into here. I think they’re going to use it for their copy equipment.
(Thinking of it! Then it is not settled, I dared to hope.)
Said Dr. Schussler: You mean I will have to hear the thump and clack of Xerox machines all day? Not to mention the smell.
Well, if it becomes a problem, said the manager, we can always move you, find you a more accommodating space. Nothing available right now. I’ll let you know if something suitable opens.
(Even Dr. Schussler might move! I thought. Everyone moving. Everything fluid. What kind of place is this?)
Well, replied the doctor, I certainly hope not to move. It disorients the patients. And then there is the problem of one’s preprinted stationery and all.
Oh, there might be a room on this floor, said the manager. You never know. And if there is, you can take your number 804 with you.
The doctor said nothing, only gave a sort of humph, and took the two steps to her own door.
The workmen lashed in their measuring tapes and left. Then the manager said to me, I’ll let you know, fella.
My legs were trembling. My mind, however, kept clear its workings. If I said nothing in reply, I thought, only nodded, Dr. Schussler could believe one of the workmen was still in the room, might believe the manager was talking to one of his men. So I therefore stepped out from my little enclosure behind the door, raised my chin to acknowledge him, and turned out the lights as he left the room.
I was still safe, I told myself. For now. She still did not know I was there.
But a sword hung over us, I knew.
98.
The patient remained skeptical about her mother’s sudden embrace of Judaism, and the rejection that had followed just as suddenly. Yet Michal persuaded her daughter to suspend disbelief, as it were, until she could continue her story. And the patient complied.
Michal then moved quickly through the early days of Belsen’s establishment as a D.P. camp (which speed gave me some hope that I might yet hear the end before losing my beloved Room 807). Within several weeks of Michal’s arrival in Belsen, British soldiers marched the survivors up the road to what had been a Panzer training school. Clean and deloused, she emphasized. Then the army burned down the original camp.
The British goal was to “get out of the D.P. business,” as Michal described it in American slang. They wanted everyone to be repatriated as quickly as possible.
But as for me, said Michal to her daughter, where was “home”? Germany? Was I going to knock on the door of my former father-in-law? The door of Albrecht’s cousins who had hated me? They would throw me into the street.
The life I had led in Berlin had been demolished. So what was I? A person without an identity, someone with a made-up name. Stateless. I was exactly where I was supposed to be: in a displaced-persons camp. I had no choice but to accept the fact that the next turn of my life would take place in Bergen-Belsen.
The tape rolled on through a period of silence before Michal finally said:
One day shortly after I was settled in the new camp, I was summoned by a British soldier. Two soldiers, she corrected herself. They walked me to a building they called the Round House. It was in a wooded area, on a rise by a small lake, lovely, mid-morning of an exquisite spring day, of the sort you never forget: the aroma of the greening earth, the scent of blooming hyacinths like a drug.
The building rose before me like a vision from a former time—my life in Berlin—an imposing structure with rounded wings at each end. We walked up a porticoed entryway, across a wide foyer, the wood floor creaking and echoing, finally to a room of palatial proportions. And for a moment my knees went weak. One young soldier accompanying me—he had a pencil mustache and deep-set eyes, very sympathetic—had to hold me up, because a sudden hallucination had come over me: I believed I was walking into the ballroom of our grand house in Berlin.
Then I saw a desk and three side tables. Four seated officers. Three or