doubtfully at the broken plant. She stood, biting her lower lip and looking at the graves, the plant, and the powdery white daisies on the blue cotton dress of the gardener.
The woman tilted her head back and looked up at Margaret. Then she picked up the plant and plopped it back into its pot. “I’ll do it when I get to it,” she said. “I won’t be in Field D for a while yet.”
“All right,” Margaret said. “That sounds good.” Margaret took care to again nestle the pot into the ivy.
The woman hustled away at high speed, bobbing up and down.
Margaret turned and walked out of the cemetery. She thought: Better not make any grand gestures again. She felt tired, and foolish. She rubbed her head. I have no place here, she thought. Again she saw the white daisies on the blue dress of the gardener. It represented something to her, something about the broad world with all its salt and pith getting funneled down into the strings that tie a sausage together. At some point, every person must make a pact with futility.
Her bicycle she had forgotten in town, and the heel of her shoe was coming loose as she walked back to the tram stop. It flapped against the cobblestones, flip-whack. She walked down the cobblestone road. There were sparrows on the ground by a high chapped-flesh wall, little tan and twig-colored nothings, picking at seeds. Margaret felt her chest hardening with pain.
The same day, Margaret returned to the Schöneberg archive. She thought, at the very least, she could find out what Herr Strauss had done for a living, or where the family lived before they moved into the apartment on Salzburgerstrasse. Her desire to know more felt like a heavy hunger, a longing for milk and oil, and in any case still desperate.
The archivist with her dancer’s body silently took down two heavy address directories from 1939 and 1941. Each listed address and occupation of Berlin residents by name, and together they peered at the Gothic script. There were twenty-three Franz Strausses listed in Berlin in 1939, and sixteen in 1941. None of them resided at Salzburgerstrasse 8. Just to be sure, Margaret checked the 1943 directory as well. Nothing.
As Margaret prepared to leave, her heart sinking, she said to the archivist, “The name is so typically German. It hardly seems like a Jewish name at all.” The archivist, like most educated Germans scrupulously careful when it came to what sounded and looked Jewish, gave Margaret a glance of feigned incomprehension. After a brief silence, however, she chanced an observation: “It isn’t really a Jewish name. What did you say the full name was?”
“Franz Strauss.”
“Just listed as Franz? No second given name?”
“None.”
“Well then, he most probably wasn’t Jewish.”
Margaret caught her breath. Her face became hot. She saw what the archivist meant. The police would have recorded him, according to Nazi law, as Franz “Israel” if he were Jewish, just as his wife was listed as Regina “Sara.” The family must have been mixed.
Margaret knew she should not be, knew it was nothing more than a detail, but still, she was crushed. When she got home, she looked at her photocopy of the police logbook page where the family’s death was registered, and saw confirmation in the margin. A longhand note, so baroque as to be almost illegible, which she had not before even bothered to decipher, read: “Bericht an Stapo mit dem Hinweis, dass Nachlaß dem A.G. Schb. übergeben wurde, weil der Haushaltungsvorstand Arier war.” So it was even specially noted that the head of house was “Aryan.” Margaret had been blind.
In light of this new information, it was unclear why the family would have had to die. She had checked already: mixed couples were not rounded up with the others, not in Berlin. Officially, the decision at the Wannsee Conference was to wait until after the war before considering the eventual extermination of the mixed and the mixed-married, a dangerous position for the Strausses, but not deadly, not in 1943.
How was Margaret to understand their decision?
They could have saved the children, she thought. It went through her mind again and again. Wasn’t there anywhere they could have sent the children? It was common, she had found in her reading, for the children of mixed families to be sent to non-Jewish relatives, where they were passed off as war orphans, of whom there were in any case so many, particularly after the bombings of cities began.
And then