prior birthdays? Did the old birthdays suddenly seem to be vaguely superfluous affairs, parties with cakes yielding over the years to dinners with wine, all the while detached from their origins, the physical facts, from the blood and guts of birth?
At none of her prior birthday parties could her mother—the woman she called Mother—at no time could this woman embarrass the patient with tales of her hard labor, the hours of pushing and breathing, the pain of the child actually coming out of her loins, the months following wherein she knew she would never again have that taut belly, those pert breasts. Therefore she had no guilt to lay upon her adopted child, who did not owe anything to this woman for a body robbed of youth.
But now there was a body, a mother to whom a physical debt was due. And not just any mother, but a Jewish one. The patient was thereby lashed not only to Maria G. but, through her, to an entire tribe, thousands of years of history, familial relationships going back in time—if one believes it—all the way to Avram, who took the name Abraham as he accepted the One God.
Was it wrong of me to abet the patient’s search, to “flesh out”—literally—the reality of Maria G.? It had all happened stepwise, I told myself. The adoptive mother was cold and rejecting. The patient was alone. The therapist could not divert her client from a quest for origins. The patient had fallen victim to the dark, circling birds of depression. And I had to help her; I was the only one who could help her. And now that I had stepped upon the path of information-giver, whetting her appetite, it was more urgent than ever that she receive an answer to the question she had posed above all others: Where did I come from?
I spent the night feverishly assembling another packet. I had to send something—anything, to extemporize until I had the hard information I needed. Fortunately I had already gathered information related to the orphaned children at Belsen. The patient herself was not an orphan. As far as we knew, her mother was very much alive when she had been surrendered. Yet I thought the patient would feel closer to her origins if she saw the photographs of the children at Belsen, and their caregiver, the camp doctor, Hadassah Bimko.
In the summer of 1945, Jewish institutions in Britain tried to move some of Belsen’s children to England, in a humane gesture. Yet Bimko and the rest of the camp leadership ferociously fought this plan. They wanted their children to go to Eretz Yisrael or else stay with their own people in the camp. And they achieved their goal of emigration. In April 1946, about a year after the camp’s liberation, the British issued special certificates for children, and Hadassah Bimko led a hundred of Belsen’s orphans to Palestine.
I thought the patient would be cheered by this story and moved by the example of Hadassah Bimko (the only woman in the camp’s leadership, as far as I could tell). The next morning, Thursday, as soon as the stores opened, I rushed to make xeroxes of the photographs at a copy shop, and then was first in line at the post office with my envelope. I had enclosed a note saying, “From the information you have given us, we do not believe you were orphaned in the Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp. However, we thought you might wish to see what happened to other youngsters who, like yourself, had spent their early days in the camp.”
That would hold the patient for a week, I hoped. Then what relief I felt when she did not begin the next session with questions about her mother. Instead there came a panicked cry about her work.
It’s pandemonium! she said. You’d think the world had come to an end. May Day, May Day! everyone keeps shouting, because the change took place on May 1st, and we feel like we’re going down.
Evidently there had been some change in rules surrounding brokerage trades. If I understood the patient correctly (something that required great concentration on my part, as I had never traded stocks and bonds in all of my life, an inexperience shared with most of the United States population), commissions on securities sales had been a fixed percentage, no matter how large or small the trade. Now, however, the percentages could vary and could be negotiated. I did not see how this mattered so