clearly as I was hearing her. It was a delicious intimacy: this side-by-side anticipation.
At last I heard the doctor’s limping footfalls on the carpet. At last she crossed the threshold of her door, closed it shut behind her. And in that instant the patient said:
I got something!
Yes?
I got something back from one of the agencies, about my adoption!
(It was a cry of happiness!)
Let me read this to you, she said to the therapist.
Then she read aloud the letter from “Colin Masters.”
(My words in her mouth!)
The therapist gasped upon hearing the name “Bergen-Belsen.” Then she sat immobile until the letter’s end.
Isn’t that wonderful? said the patient. I know where my mother was. I know where I came from. The Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp, in Celle, Germany. And maybe he’ll send me more information. Here. Look at the pictures he sent.
I could hear the rest of the papers being withdrawn from the envelope, the sound of the doctor shuffling through them.
Finally Dr. Schussler said: Some of these pictures are quite shocking. Are you sure you are not dispirited by them?
No, said the patient. Not at all. I looked at the women preparing food, at the babies. One of them might be me! I can’t explain my excitement. Here. I existed here. I don’t come from some vague unknown gray space in the universe, but from this particular place, a place on a map. I can’t explain it. I felt a kind of realness that I had never experienced before. Physical realness.
She paused.
And I wish I could play for you the cassette I received, she went on. It’s a recording of the just-liberated inmates singing a Hebrew song. I have never heard anything so … heartbreaking in my life. If one of the voices was my mother’s, I couldn’t be prouder of her than if she’d been—I don’t know who, the Queen of Sheba. Do you understand? I come from these extraordinary people, I realized I am … overwhelmed with … Oh, God. I can’t express it.
The patient stuttered softly, as if she was considering, then discarding, words that might describe her state. Joy! I wanted to supply. Joy is what you are feeling!
The therapist said nothing for a full minute, which allowed her patient to experience the moment silently, a change of technique for the doctor, for in the past she would have pressed in by now with “Any words?” or “Do you feel this is related to…?”
Then, being the horrid woman she was, she said:
Have you told your parents?
Huh? said the patient, awakening from her joyous dream.
Your mother and father, your adoptive parents. Have you told them about your news?
The patient bolted upright in her chair.
No! she said in a dark, ugly voice, one that seemed to come from a creature other than the young woman just finding her happiness. Why should I tell them? she went on, speaking as a dybbuk. Mother forbade me to discuss this matter further. “Forbade”: her word.
Well, said the doctor, because they are the ones who raised you and think of you as their daughter. And I do not believe it is in your interest to keep shutting them out of your thoughts.
How dare the doctor do this! The patient immediately reverted to the depressed creature she had been. Her joy was banished; her newly found life was roped to the old one; her sense of being real suddenly made false again. It had to be the work of Dr. Schussler’s guilt, I decided. All that angst over her Nazi father’s misdeeds—the moment Dr. Schussler saw the pictures of Bergen-Belsen—up it rose.
It was more than I could bear. I shut my ears to the rest of the session!
53.
I was more determined than ever to get information about her mother to the patient. I could not leave her alone in the clutches of that Nazi daughter. The therapist’s professionalism had crumbled at the very idea of Bergen-Belsen. I thanked God that the patient had not been adopted out of Drancy, the transit camp into which the doctor’s Obersturmbannführer father had dumped the Jews of France. Who knows what ugly motives hide in the shade of guilt?
I continued my research and soon found information I believed would hearten the patient.
After liberation, the camp disappeared from the news. Then it reappeared in dramatic fashion: with coverage of the “Lüneburg trials,” British military tribunals at which the guards and commandants of Bergen-Belsen faced justice. It was not the content of the trials I wished to communicate—the transcripts made for grim