And about my father … Michal would never say. Only that he was decent in his lovemaking—some women were used brutally. He wanted his bedmate to have pleasure—he made sure she had it. She absolutely had to enjoy herself, another sort of tyranny, I always thought, if you do not care for a man and he refuses to stop until you climax. They spent two weeks together, then he returned whenever he was on leave.
Michal knows his name, she said hurriedly, but she will not tell me. She says she “forgot” it. Nonsense. She does not want me to find him. He was just “a depositor of Nazi sperm” is all Michal will say about it.
We sat quietly. I think we were both trying to imagine this depositor of Nazi sperm. Then I broke in to say:
He kept coming back, you said. Maybe up until the end, right before Michal was exposed?
Yes. No. I have no idea.
But about my counting months. If he was there near the end … it’s possible … he might also be my father.
We surveyed each other’s face once again, looking for evidence: Did we have the same father?
I cannot say, Leni replied finally. We look alike, and neither of us looks like Michal, which would seem to indicate yes, we look like our father. That we both came from the same depositor of Nazi sperm. But then again, I cannot comment about any of Michal’s relatives, because she has nothing of them, no pictures, nothing. But of course there was once a whole family of Rothmans, hundreds of them if one counts all the generations and all the aunts, uncles, and cousins who were still living before the war. And we might look like any one of them.
We were quiet. The time “before the war”: completely lost.
Finally I said to her: So am I also … Lebensborn?
Many seconds went by before Leni said: Maybe.
123.
I couldn’t say another word, the patient told Dr. Schussler. It was more than I could deal with right then. I just sat there staring at the wall. But then something awful occurred to me.
Michal went looking for you, I said to Leni. She looked for you and found you.
Leni’s response was to drum her fingers on the table, look out the window, finally turn to me. She looked so hard into my eyes that I could hardly stand it.
Yes, she said. Michal looked for me. I am sorry for you to learn this now because—
Michal never looked for me.
Leni’s fingers kept drumming.
Why didn’t she ever look for me?
Leni leaned forward, gripped the edge of the table.
Look. Do not compare our situations. They are not at all the same. You see, once Michal had been exposed as a Jew, she was afraid that the child she had given birth to—me—she was afraid I would become an Ausschusskind. Do you know what that is? What they called a garbage child. She was afraid that whoever or whatever was raising me would find out that the mother was Jewish. And they would toss me out, send me to some unspeakable orphanage, where I would become one of the castoffs upon whom the Nazis performed terrible experiments. She could not rest until she knew what had happened to me.
Leni gave a bitter laugh.
Of course I did not become a garbage child or a Nazi experiment. I was being raised in a rich, proper Nazi family who were secretly guarding the future of the race. The first that anyone in Germany knew I was Jewish was when Michal found me.
And how did they know she was Jewish? Leni went on with a laugh. She is so fair and blond. She could have passed for “Aryan.” But she had to say she was Jewish or my German parents never would have let me go—guarding the future of the race, and all that.
I was nine years old. My parents could never again feel the same way toward me. They had never been exactly warm parents, were mainly dutiful. Then … Then Michal appears. She appears and my whole world goes to hell.
Now I did indeed become a sort of garbage child. Because my German parents were too shocked even to look at me. Their obligation was over. Worse, they barely knew what to do with me. I wandered around their house—it was their house now; not mine. I was afraid they would send me—where? Drop me on the doorstep of a synagogue? Leave