The answer was in my husband’s eyes. Moving forward, we would have to trust no one outside of our family.
“What do we do about Mayim?” he asked.
I could never bring myself to send Mayim away, but she couldn’t stay. We couldn’t allow our children to be brainwashed, but we had no choice other than to allow our children to be brainwashed.
I couldn’t join my thoughts together in a way that made sense.
“My love,” Jürgen said suddenly. I turned to him, and he gave me a gentle smile. The skin around his swollen eye crinkled. “Leave it with me, will you? Let me think on it.”
He went inside to take a nap after that. Mayim retreated to Adele’s house with Laura, and I went next door to join them. Adele made me sickly sweet, milky tea, and every time I finished a cup, she refilled it. In the end, we sat in near silence, but for the sound of Laura’s chatter as she pottered around. I nursed that final cup of tea in my hands, too full to drink it but drawing comfort from the warmth.
When Jürgen woke he joined us, and he insisted I go home for a nap too. And when I roused again, I slipped out of the bedroom and into the living room, where I found Jürgen and Mayim sitting across from one another on the sofas. Mayim was crying, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.
“I had already decided to leave, Sofie,” she said.
“But how will you survive?” I asked, stricken.
“I’m strong. My family is strong,” she said, her voice breaking. “Besides, we don’t have a choice. You know that’s true, even if you wish it wasn’t.”
In the foyer less than an hour later, I stood opposite my best friend, staring into her eyes.
“I’m going to be okay,” Mayim insisted. But she was pale, and I knew that she did not believe that any more than I did. I had been increasingly aware that she and her family were in danger. Until that moment in the foyer, I fooled myself that as long as she was in our house, she was safe.
But I had become someone who would sit at a dinner party and crack jokes about pork knuckle when a man spoke of Mayim and her family as vermin. I was someone who would let my child read anti-Semitic books.
I was someone who would let my best friend be sent away, even as our country turned its back on her.
She was in danger, and I was a part of the problem, not the solution. I just didn’t know how to fix any part of that without risking Jürgen’s life.
It was an impossible, unbearable position.
“I don’t know how to get through the day without you,” I blurted.
“Me either,” she whispered unevenly. “That is something we are both going to have to figure out.”
“I want my children to be like you,” I said, hot tears rolling onto my cheeks. “I wanted you to help me shape them to be better people. I don’t know how to be a good mother without your help.”
“Nonsense.” She pressed a hand to my chest, flattening it over my heart. “It’s all here, Sofie. You’re already a better mother than you know.”
We were both sobbing now, each of us increasingly distressed. We’d been children together, and then we’d navigated adolescence, and those first brave steps into adulthood at finishing school, and then she’d been by my side when I married Jürgen and had my children.
Undeserving of her love though I knew myself to be, I was certain I was every bit as important to Mayim as she was to me. That was part of the wonder of her—that she loved me dearly, despite my flaws.
“Sofie,” Jürgen said. He had taken her bags to the car and was waiting to drive her to her parents’ apartment. He gave me a helpless look. “Mayim and I need to go.”
I threw my arms around her one last time and I whispered fiercely in her ear, “Go to Moshe. Go to Poland.” She stiffened, and I choked on a sob. I dropped my voice further, until I knew she had to strain to hear me. “Please. Please. Adele was right. Germany is not safe for you anymore. It hasn’t been safe for a long time.”
Adele came across that night and cooked dinner for us. I knew that the sausages and mashed potatoes would have been salty and buttery and delicious, but I pushed the food around my plate, too distraught to eat. Georg and Laura were unsettled too, each protesting at feigned outrages I was too depressed to acknowledge. When Laura threw a piece of sausage at Jürgen, seemingly without provocation, he pushed his chair back and said sternly, “Upstairs. Now. Both of you.”
The children were visibly startled by their mild-mannered father, and they marched obediently upstairs with Jürgen close behind. The minute Adele and I were alone, I burst into tears. She came around the table to sit beside me and rested her hand over mine.