“How?” I had cramps again and the awful sensation that my blood was draining from my insides. My hands trembled; I couldn’t focus.
“What happened, Grace? Do you have paper and a pen? Could you write it down?”
I could certainly write it all down. How I had missed her, and how I longed for her company. I scrambled for something on the nightstand but stopped as a sharp pain stabbed my lower abdomen. Each twist of muscles, each stab of pain, was a sharp retort to my will.
Lola spun around and went out, and a moment later, she returned with a pen and a piece of writing paper. From the door, Fengshan peered at me, sighed, and went back to his room.
I held the pen. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like doing anything. Writing down the incident word by word. Explaining what happened sentence by sentence. What was the point? My body had been destroyed, and my future as well. But Lola. This was for Lola. I wrote slowly. I had a terrible accident and had a miscarriage. They removed my uterus.
Had I told her about my dream to be a mother? I was sure I had.
“You’ll recover, and you’ll grow strong, Grace,” she said.
I can never have children again, I wrote.
She took the pen, dipped her head and wrote, But you’re still alive. I’ve watched so many shot or beaten to death. Many lost their children and their families. Many Jews were driven apart and cruelly murdered.
I let the pen slip from my grip. Was this all she could say to me? Was my loss anything less because of the losses of others? By the light coming through the windows, I saw my friend had changed after a year. Her plump face sharpened, her green eyes were huge; there was a flinty look and a steely intensity in her that belonged to those who had been caged and trapped.
“What happened last year? I went to the building in the slum, but you were gone,” I asked, forgetting her hearing problem. So I wrote the words down.
“I lost the tickets you gave me. So I was ordered to get on a train to the Mauthausen camp with the others in the building. The train ran into cattle and flipped. We were rescued by Theo. Since then I’ve joined him to complete missions.”
Who’s Theo? What missions?
“Smuggling. Living on the edge of death and horror and betrayal, in and out of the country.”
For almost a year, she had been saving people’s lives. While I had been worried that she’d been arrested or killed.
Why did you come back now? Holding the pen, I scribbled on the paper, each word untidy, childish, squiggles of shadows. How exhausting this form of conversation was, spelling out the letters.
“I was severely injured during a mission and my hearing was impaired. I’m no longer useful. It’s time to start a new life. I wanted to see you. Here’s your Dickinson. I kept her with me all these months.”
The book felt heavy in my hand and warm with her touch. Do you like her poetry?
It was an easy question, but Lola didn’t pay attention. She picked up the bottle of morphine on my nightstand and mumbled something in German.
“Lola?”
She didn’t answer, immersed in her silent world. Perhaps she didn’t realize she was speaking German; perhaps it was no longer important for her to include me; perhaps this was all that we had come to be, creatures of aloofness, apart from others, adrift from the world.
I put down the pen, tired, my body numb from bedsores. How had it happened? All these months, I had thought of her, but somehow I wished she hadn’t returned. Or had I been poisoned by morphine? I only wanted someone to commiserate with, cry with, and wipe tears with. But the person was not Lola.
She had changed, but she was still agile, still young, and she looked strong, healthy, with her baggy outfit, her boots, and her scar. She had lost her hearing during a mission, but she could still be a mother, start a family and live a blissful family life; she was unlike me, a useless, pathetic thing.
What was happening to me? Where did those unhealthy, bitter thoughts come from?
Fengshan came in. “Grace, I’m afraid Miss Schnitzler has to go. The Gestapo officers are coming.”
“Gestapo?”
“It looks like they are searching for her.”
He handed Lola a note, and she raced to the window, looked out, returned to Fengshan, and jotted something on the paper—she was too adroit, too swift—and he nodded. Eichmann—I caught the word in something she said, and Fengshan wrote something quickly down. They were debating, discussing something.
Their silent communication was not well coordinated, but they were compatible enough. Fengshan appeared urgent and Lola alert; it was like watching a silent movie.
I was thirsty. I should ask for water—Lola couldn’t hear, but Fengshan would undoubtedly get it for me. Yet I didn’t feel like asking. It all seemed irrelevant: quenching thirst, or asking what they were talking about, or getting away from the Gestapo, or even Lola.
“Grace, I need to go, but I’ll see you again,” she said at the door.
I didn’t say anything. She couldn’t hear anyway.
Fengshan left with her. The bedroom, once again, sank into an empty socket of dimness; the thrumming of the machines began to drone from the adjacent building, mixed with the creaking of Fengshan’s office door. And then the door was shut.
There was silence, and then from somewhere came the clatter of doors and the harsh commands in German.
I looked outside. The sky looked like a damp handkerchief, and the trees were bare like bones. I needed more morphine.
CHAPTER 60
FENGSHAN
He could hear what Lola wasn’t able to: the boots outside the window and the Gestapo’s questions to the apartment’s doorman, and he urged Lola to leave. But all she wanted to know about was Grace’s accident and how it had happened. When. Who. When she saw Eichmann’s name, Lola unleashed a string of curses in German and swore, “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!”
Fengshan had to be brief and forceful in order to lead her to the back door of the apartment building. Thank God she trusted him, following him out of the hallway. By the time he returned to his room, the two officers had entered the hallway, imposing a lockdown on the entire building.
They were looking for a female smuggler with a scar on her face, they declared, and they would search from door to door.
Fengshan locked the room behind him and looked out the window. The snow was storming outside, bending the thin limbs of sycamores and chestnut trees; the black Mercedes was parked near a pile of white snow. There was no sign of Miss Schnitzler in her oversized black coat. He held the cross in his hand, praying that she would be safe.
The next day, the snowstorm gathered force, turning into a blinding blizzard. The vicious wind whipped the windows; heaps of snow reached the windowsills. The fire in the fireplace wouldn’t ignite; all the logs appeared to be damp. The temperature in the apartment plunged below five degrees Celsius. His feet freezing, he paced the room, wearing layers of coats. Monto’s school wouldn’t close, so Monto had gone to school as usual; Grace was shivering on her bed. He piled on her all the blankets they had in the apartment.
Still, not a single Viennese came to apply for visas.
If what Miss Schnitzler said was true, that many Viennese Jews, confined in camps, were unable to come to apply for visas, then he should be accustomed to resting his pen on the desk from now on. And in fact, without visa issuance, with few staff and little news to report, his consulate was playing a negligible role for his country. For the first time in his five-year career as a diplomat, he wondered if the Ministry, or the ambassador, had laid out a design he wasn’t aware of. It was likely that he would be reassigned.