sustained her (to my relief, as week by week I learned of their steady support). The rains had gone on unusually late in the year; we lived under the unnatural extension of daylight savings time; the continued rains made the afternoons as dark as night. Our whole environment seemed unreal, a stage that had been set by a bored and irritable god.
It was the weekend following the spring break. The sands of Ocean Beach were suddenly littered with medical waste—used syringes, tubing, IV bags—that had washed up on shore from some mysterious source. I walked along, believing that some overwhelming disaster had befallen the Western world, that our way of life was on the verge of extinction. Oil crisis, unemployment, stagflation, a fruitless war in Vietnam slowly coming to an end. San Francisco seemed a dark and frightening place. Patty Hearst’s kidnapping. White people all over the city had been murdered in the Zebra killings. The Zodiac serial killer was still at large.
When all at once, as my footfall squeezed fluid from an IV bag and I was overcome with disgust, a memory surfaced. It was the patient’s adoptive mother speaking: Somewhere in the story she had told her daughter. The part about a form she had found in the locked desk. Information about the birth mother. Date of birth: May 17, 1921. Place of birth: Berlin. Last known residence: Celle.
Celle! I raced back to the cottage, to the wall where I had hung up a map of Europe, pins in every place where there had been a D.P. camp. Celle! The British called it Celle Camp or Hohne, but the internees insisted upon calling it by the name that had dishonored the place: Bergen-Belsen.
50.
I had found the patient’s mother! Amongst all the million refugees crisscrossing Europe, there she was: in the Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp. There could be no other explanation for her last known residence being Celle, for it was both a British name for the camp and the largest nearby town. I was certain: It was to Belsen she had come after surviving the war, and it was there that she had surrendered her child—my child, as I thought of her. My dear patient.
This alone should be enough to cheer her, I thought. Having an avenue of investigation would rejuvenate her spirits, reignite the intelligence that was her rope line, the faculty that always saved her from the depths. How like me she was, I thought: never properly loved, not trusting therefore, believing only in the picture of the world constructed by her analyzing mind.
My problem was how to communicate my finding. There being no mechanism immediately revealing itself to me, I decided to continue my investigations, reasoning (optimistically, against all my native impulses) that such a moment would appear. It seemed impossible to me that I might be in a position to help my dear patient yet not find a way to reach her. I believed I was her sole hope, as I have said, and, to my surprise, I found that being so needed was a tonic for the personality, drawing one away from contemplation of the abyss and into the daylight of necessity. Normal people know this, of course. They have begotten children and are, in turn, needed by them. And in like manner, I had adopted my child, my dear patient.
I therefore passed my days at the various libraries, first reviewing newspaper photographs, listening to recordings of BBC radio reports, and watching the films made by the British brigade who were first to come upon Bergen-Belsen and liberate the camp, on April 15, 1945.
All the horror I had felt when first learning of the camp came back to me. The forty thousand unburied corpses. The living scarcely more alive than the dead. The picture of a local German boy strolling pleasantly down a country road, bodies lining the margins like a hedgerow made in hell. A woman crouched among the dead, naked. The dead all around her. The dead children.
The dead, the dead, the dead. As the Nazis retreated from the Red Army, they tried to cover up their crimes. Any inmate still living was forced to move west: to walk, most dying along the way; to ride, shoved like cargo into boxcars. In the last week before Belsen was liberated, the Germans dumped thirty thousand human beings into the camp. Then, three days before the British reached Belsen, they abandoned them. The living corpses were left to their own devices: No water. Little