by saying: But she is carrying my son’s child! She is pregnant with a good German child!
I nearly fainted. Oh, God. A child.
Michal stopped speaking; the wind rushed into the pause; there came the sound of something tapping, perhaps Michal’s cane against stone. After some seconds, she resumed, her voice lowered, flat, drained.
I got away that day, she said. But now I had to keep the subterfuge going. But how long could I do it? I was already supposed to be four months pregnant. I would have to begin to “show” again. I had managed to keep my girdle, but the stuffing had been thrown away, and now I had to smuggle in some stuff, bit by bit, in a handbag. Without Albrecht, I had to find a way to dispose of my menstrual pads, again in my handbag, which became stained one day, a stain I had to explain to Marta as a cut on my hand. But there was no cut.
It was inevitable. My spirit had already surrendered. One day, while I was in the bath, Marta broke in—broke the flimsy lock on the door. She saw the girdle, the stuffing. She reported me to the Gerstners.
I must tell you this scene, she went on. We are in the great drawing room in which my mother once held her salons. Dieter calls me in. Frau Gerstner is there, Marta is there, and her husband, Hans. Dieter says, You cur! You liar! There never were any pregnancies, were there?
It must have been all arranged, because right then the officers were ushered in, and I was taken away.
There was a long pause. On the tape, the patient then asked, Where did you go?
I was taken to Theresienstadt, then to a labor camp in Poland.
There was another long pause.
And what happened to you there? the patient asked.
I told you, said Michal. We would not discuss this part. Nothing happened to me. It was nothing about me, personally, as a human being. The point was to humiliate us and take away our personhood. What happened to me is what happened to everyone.
But you survived, said the patient. I think it’s … heroic.
Michal laughed.
Heroic! That is ridiculous. All I had to do was convert and have my husband protect me for years, while the Jews of Berlin slowly disappeared. If he had died a year earlier, I would be another rotting piece of flesh in some mound in Poland. Heroism! Living through that time had nothing to do with my heroism. The heroism was all my dear Albrecht’s. He endured the taunts of his family. He defied the race laws. He kept me alive.
The tape whined on, as if empty. The patient clicked off the machine.
She made me stop taping, she said to Dr. Schussler. Gerda helped her up, and they started back to the house. At the doorway, Michal turned and said to me, Come back tomorrow, and I will get to the part where you come in. After the war. To Belsen.
85.
To Belsen, to Belsen. The words rattled in my thoughts in the rhythm of a rushing train. I was the one who had gotten us here, on that train hurrying to the site of the patient’s birth. And what awaited us?
I did not fall asleep until the sky was brightening; I awoke past three o’clock in the afternoon. I am not certain why, but I switched on the battered radio my landlord had left me, something I rarely did, since, as I have said, its defective tuner drifted along the dial. I must have wanted to hear a sound, any sound, to vanquish the words that had installed themselves in my mind. To Belsen, to Belsen. Through the static came bits of traffic reports, sports scores, commercial advertisements, weather forecasts; when suddenly there came the jangle of a fake teletype, then a man’s excited voice shouting:
Bulletin! Bulletin! Patty Hearst captured!
After which the voice, the fake teletype, the news reports, the ads, all drifted off into the static storm.
I tried to retune the station but succeeded well enough only to hear “fugitive heiress,” “FBI,” and “house in the Outer Mission.” I rushed out to a nearby electronics store, where televisions normally were tuned to each of the five stations received in the area. All the channels had interrupted their normal programming, their announcers excitedly reporting the story.
The newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who had been dragged screaming from her Berkeley apartment some seventeen months ago by a group calling itself the Symbionese