“Ich hasse diese Fotos. Wirklich. Abscheulich,” Eva said when she returned and then she went into the kitchen to pour one more brandy. When she came back, Elena had put the photos away, but she was smiling strangely. Her fear was gone. It was as if she thought she had won some battle, surmised Eva. Well, Eva thought, let her see how she feels when she’s my age. She hated Elena now for her youth. She often hated the young. The hate would pass, she knew. Just as the blackness would drain out of her.
“That must have been very hard.” Elena said. “Vati wasn’t the angel I always thought he was. I know that, Mutti. I still love him, the memory of him. But I know he wasn’t perfect.”
“Good heavens! It’s Christmas Eve. Talk of joy and love, Elena. Your father was an angel. Perfect, no, but an angel, yes. Angels were just as human as us once.”
“Mutti, stay here tonight. Yes? It’s too late for you to go back to your place. Stay here with me.”
“Danke, Elena. Okay, Ich bleibe. Danke.”
Chapter 16
She remembered so vividly the day Liezel arrived for that visit, as if her mind contained color photographs of that special day, a catalogue of pictures imprinted on her brain. Her baby, her baby sister, whose cuts she kissed, whose tears she wiped, whose breakfast, lunch, and dinner she prepared. Who was so afraid after their mother died. So needy. That day, as she waited at the train station, was one of the happiest days of her life. She remembered the dress she wore—blue cotton, with little white flowers. She remembered the smell of her cologne, 4711, a citrus floral, and the smell of her own nervous sweat. Liezel, the baby she wished was hers, then later became hers. Sometimes she thought, I willed my mother to die. I wanted Liezel all to myself, and God answered me. God gave me what I wished for.
“Jetzt, bin ich deine Mutti, Liezele.”
“Du bist nicht meine Mutter,” she had answered, angrily. “Du bist meine Schwester. Du bist meine Eva.”
“Ja, aber jetzt, wo Mutti bei den Engeln ist, will ich deine Mutti sein.”
They slept in the same bed. Liezel’s warm body and her hot breath warming Eva on many a cold night. Liezel had needed her but didn’t realize that Eva had needed her.
To leave Liezel with Maria, who hated their father’s children from his dead wife, seemed the cruelest thing in the world. But what was she supposed to do? What could she have done differently? Honestly! She couldn’t have taken Liezel with her—no one would have hired her. She’d had no choice.
Now she was coming to visit, on a vacation from her job as an au pair in Paris. She had written her and explained how well she was—how she got a position with a wealthy family in Paris. How she spoke French and Italian, from spending time as a maid at a hotel in Italy.
Liezel had stayed a child in Eva’s mind. So to meet the beautiful adolescent—the young woman, really; although she was seventeen, she, like Eva at that age, was undoubtedly a young woman—was shocking. Eva had been well into her marriage, and tired of it, and her daughter was growing independent, busy with school and friends. Hugo and she were sleeping with other people.
She wanted to ask Liezel about Vati and Willi, but she didn’t. She wanted to hold her sister in her arms for hours, but she didn’t. She couldn’t stop touching her, though. At one point, Liezel moved discreetly away from her touch. It was too much touching, Eva knew.
Did she sleep with Hugo out of revenge? Revenge for abandoning her in Leoben? Liezel must have thought that Eva didn’t care, but that wasn’t true. They never talked about it. To this day, they’d never talked about it—about Liezel’s feelings of pain and fear when Eva left, nor about her sleeping with Hugo that summer. Why talk about it? It wouldn’t change things. It wouldn’t change a thing.
But how could she ever forget? The shrieks of ecstasy, no different from shrieks of pain, coming from the guest room, her sister’s shrieks, her husband causing them. Eva would take Elena on long walks. She visited her friends, their friends really, as Eva had no friends of her own. No, everyone was friends with Hugo; their life together revolved around him, his status as a photographer, an artist of importance in East Germany. Eva was just the wife, a simple nurse, perceived as a simple woman, she knew. She didn’t have artistic ambitions or inclinations. She knew what people thought of her. Perhaps she wasn’t creative, but she wasn’t naive, either.
Wolf and Greta Biermann were their neighbors as well as their close friends, and they had a daughter Elena’s age. Wolf, the poet, later left Berlin altogether. His work was often the work of criticism. This, to Eva, was not very exciting work. It was often very clinical, almost dogmatic. She preferred emotional art. Of course, political art could be emotional in its own way, but it wasn’t personal enough for Eva. Not that anyone cared about her opinions.
She treated Greta like a friend. Greta was a painter. Greta was an artist. She said to Greta, “Hugo is sleeping with my sister.”
“Nein, das kann nicht sein, Eva.”
But it was true. Eva didn’t push it. She’d just had to say it, even if only to one person, even if that person didn’t believe her. And, of course, later, she realized that Greta was sleeping with Hugo, too.
Chapter 17
Christmas Day was always somewhat of a disappointment after the joyous light of Christmas Eve. She had slept in her daughter’s bed, warm and loved, and today she headed back to her apartment with her gifts—the odd, disturbing book of photographs, the lovely
