We Were Strangers Once Read online

  Their “surprise” turned out to be a boy. At first, they thought to give him a G name, but Rudolph insisted that it wouldn’t be fair to start a baby out as a joke, and Elisabeth decided to name him after her father’s father, which is how Egon escaped being Günther or Gregor. They made him a perfect nursery: Elisabeth painted the walls a golden yellow and put pale orange curtains on the windows so that when the morning light shone through them, everything in the room looked as if it were lit by the sun itself.

  They scrutinized Egon the way they would any new species. Rudolph made notes on his development, and Elisabeth sketched in exquisite detail the veins on his eyelids and the flecks of his fingernails. If love meant caring for and obsessing over one’s latest creation, then this was a beloved child. But long before his arrival, Elisabeth and Rudolph had created their own ecosystem, thriving on each other for nourishment and breathing only each other’s air. In this way Egon would remain outside their universe, a well-observed child but a child apart.

  2.

  Little Egon, with his father’s lean architecture and his mother’s wide blue eyes, had a pleasing temperament. From the time he took his first steps at thirteen months, he’d rock back and forth and sideways in rhythm to whatever music was playing. His “dancing” made his parents laugh and clap, and later, his piano playing made them sit up and listen. He spent his childhood figuring out other ways to hold their interest. While his father wrote, his mother took him to the Stadtwald and taught him about the birds. Before he said his first words, he knew how to kiss the back of his hand to make a squeaking sound that would catch the attention of chickadees and warblers. When he was old enough to hold a colored pencil, he’d sit with Elisabeth after school and draw animals. By the time he was seven, he could articulate the hook of a crane’s hind toe and draw a goat’s eye well enough that she framed his best pictures and hung them next to her own. She called him “Mein schön vogel junge,” her beautiful bird boy.

  On infrequent weekends, Egon and his father would hike in the woods. Egon greeted these outings with a mixture of dread and excitement. His father would instruct him: “Follow me and be very quiet.” Rudolph would clasp his hands behind his back and walk several paces ahead, keeping his eyes focused on the tree branches or the shrubs beside their trail. He could go a whole afternoon without speaking, except when they passed a grasshopper or happened to spot a white-tailed deer. Then he would become animated, reciting the Latin name of the insect or animal and waiting for Egon to repeat it.

  One afternoon, they came upon a baby turtledove that had fallen from its nest. Rudolph bent down and whispered, “Sweet thing, how far away from home you are.” He scooped the bird up with a handkerchief and held it in both hands, the way a child would hold a ladybug. “Don’t worry, little one, we’ll make you whole again and soon you’ll fly away.”

  It was the first time Egon had heard his father use this tender tone with anyone other than his mother. In his longing to have his father address him that way, he began greeting whatever animal or insect they happened to encounter in the same kindly manner. “Hello, Mr. Dragonfly. Would you like a blade of grass for lunch today?”

  His father would assume the tiny squeaky voice of a dragonfly and answer, “Thank you, I’m not a grass eater, but if you would be so good as to fetch me a plump mosquito, that would suit me fine.”

  Though it was an intimacy channeled through birds and insects, it was intimacy nonetheless. When they came upon a praying mantis with an injured leg or a dove with a broken wing, they’d collect the animal in a hat and bring it home to Elisabeth. Caring for the wounded animals was what they did as a family, and since Egon was an only child, the creatures’ companionship took up the sibling slack.

  When Egon was eight, he and his father took a train to Berlin to see the 1910 Automobile Exposition. Rudolph was intrigued by modern inventions and shared his wonder about the new autos: “I hear they can go thirty miles an hour, some as fast as forty. That’s faster than a goshawk. Someday you’ll be driving one of these things.”

  It was the first time Egon had left Frankfurt. Everything about the train was foreign to him: the plush maroon velvet seats; the brass hooks and railing; the shades you could roll up and down by pulling on a rope. The Main River and familiar cathedrals faded from his view as new rivers and strange buildings filled his window. “I don’t understand why anyone would ever leave Frankfurt,” he said to his father. “I never will.”

  His father smiled without looking at him and said, “Of course, you’re homesick for your mutti. It’s good for you to experience something new. The whole world isn’t walks in the Stadtwald with your old parents.” But to Egon it was.

  The exhibition hall was cavernous and filled with dozens of automobiles that looked like something out of the comic strips. But what really caught Egon’s eye was the brand-new Daimler model in the center ring of the hall. The way the lights bounced off that cerulean car reminded him of stars on a clear night. An odd thought jumped into his head: That car crackled and dazzled like the current between his parents. The same kind of light shone on them when his father pressed his mother’s shoulder as he passed her in the hall and called her mein schatz, or when she’d lean down and kiss his hair as he sat writing.

  Egon was reminded of that exposition four years later, when he was in gymnasium. By then he was twelve, tall and graceful, with riveting blue eyes and his father’s thick curly hair. After school one day, before summer recess, a girl named Leni Freedburg asked him to go for a walk with her in the Stadtwald. She was fourteen, two years older than Egon, with breasts so pointy it was rumored among the boys that if you bumped into her, they would leave puncture wounds. She was attractive, with long blond hair, a full bottom lip, and a straight nose; only her eyes, a little farther apart than they ought to have been, kept her from being a real beauty. Egon said yes to Leni’s offer because he was polite, and because she was the first girl to show any interest in him.

  They walked in the woods and he pointed out the birds and insects. After he showed her a butterfly pupa, Leni turned to him and stroked his black hair, saying, “You carry so much in that pretty head of yours.”

  He smiled. “These are the things my parents have taught me.”

  She smiled and stood on her tiptoes. “I imagine this is something your parents haven’t taught you.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. At first, all he could feel were her breasts, not sharp at all but warm and soft as rabbits. He was so preoccupied with them that it took him a while to open his mouth and let in her sharp citrusy taste. The kissing, her tongue in his mouth, the breasts against his ribs, would have been enough. But Leni, perhaps sensing that she’d unearthed a wellspring, took Egon’s trembling hand, ran it under her shirt, and placed it on her bosom. Tears of gratitude filled his eyes as he gently petted and stroked the yielding rabbits.

  With his hand wedged deep in the promised land of Leni Freedburg’s breasts, he remembered the auto exhibition in Berlin and how the dazzling Daimler had reminded him of what passed between his parents. Now, that same warmth and energy coursed through him as well. God bless Leni Freedburg. With her generous nature and rabbit breasts, she had delivered him from his otherness, at least for a few moments.

  By the middle of the summer of 1914, while Egon was indulging in Leni Freedburg, the rest of the country was reveling in war against Russia, France, and Belgium. Convinced that a victory would free them from the rule of greedy bankers and industrialists, the eager warriors at the top of the German government roused the country out of its dozy complacency. Even Egon was swept up in the patriotic fervor, wishing he were a couple of years older so he could enlist in the army. Elisabeth did not share his elation and told him, “I am so glad you’re too young for all this nonsense.”

  Late in August, right before Egon was ready to go back to school, he and his mother found a nest of sparrow eggs on a low branch of a chestnut tree near where they’d been drawing. For the next week, they
came every day, waiting for the spotted eggs to hatch. When they finally did, the chicks, each no bigger than a plum, were naked, helpless, and blind, and Egon and Elisabeth hovered nearby, as did the male and female sparrows.

  One morning, Egon noticed a goshawk concealed in a nearby bush. Before he could nudge his mother, the hawk swooped down and gripped the male sparrow in its toes. The flapping of the hawk’s wings sounded like sheets in the wind as it tore into the sparrow’s throat and eviscerated him with its sharp talons. The female flew wildly around her chicks. Her harsh chattering sounded more like grief than anything Egon had ever heard. He saw his mother’s face darken as she put her pencils and pad on the grass and wrapped her fingers around the pocket watch that she wore on a gold chain. That was when she told Egon about her father, and how she always looked for him in the birds. “It’s more that I feel him than I see him,” she said. From then on, the birds became his family as well.

  After three years, the war that had ignited Germany’s spirit was grinding down. “Don’t stare,” his mother told Egon the first time they saw a man wearing a black patch over the place where his nose had been. It was hard not to look at first, but over time the sight of men with empty eye sockets and missing limbs became commonplace even in the Stadtwald, where some returning soldiers with nowhere else to go took refuge.

  Now fifteen, Egon towered over his mother and went with her to the Stadtwald more for her company than for the birds. One day, as they strolled down a familiar path, they noticed something curious about a nest on an overhanging branch. Most nests were constructed from organic matter—thistles, rootlets, fine strips of bark or sticks. But this one was a hodgepodge of paper, string, and some vegetation. “It looks like something a child would make,” he said.

  “No,” said his mother, studying the nest closely. “It’s because of all the people who sleep here now. They leave behind their garbage and the birds scavenge.”

  “So they are feeling it too,” said Egon.

  “We all are,” said his mother.

  The Schneiders, like most Jews in Frankfurt, were secular. Not observant, they celebrated only the new year and Passover. The day before Rosh Hashanah, Egon went to the bakery to buy some challah. The shelves were mostly empty of the Linzertorten and apfelkuchen that always accompanied Rosh Hashanah dinners. As he left the bakery with only a loaf of yeast bread, a man approached him. He had one leg and was leaning on a crutch. His clothes were ragged and there were wounds on his face the color of pomegranates. The man extended a filthy hand. “Please, sir, won’t you buy this shoelace?” The lace was brown and tattered at the edges, and because the man was missing some teeth, the word shoelace blew through his lips like a whistle. Egon’s first impulse was to back away, but there was something about the man that caught his attention. “Please, sir, a few pennies.”

  Egon looked into the man’s bruised and tired eyes, and the man turned his head. In that instant, Egon understood that it was Herr Menke, his old science teacher. It was clear that Herr Menke did not want to be acknowledged, so Egon reached into his pocket and gave him all the money he had, as well as the bread.

  “Thank you, sir.” Herr Menke made a slight bow and turned away.

  Egon was relieved his old teacher did not acknowledge him, and walked on as fast as he could.

  What happened with Herr Menke was not the kind of thing he could tell his father, who was preoccupied with his new book about the wildflowers of Europe and so unwilling to believe what was happening in Germany that he had proclaimed more than once, “I will not allow talk of doomsday in this house.” Normally, Egon would have confided this event to his mother, but she was busy fighting her own war in the Stadtwald, and he hardly saw her anymore.

  In the Stadtwald, the wounded and homeless slept under the trees and washed in the lake and ponds but were so slapdash about their garbage and excrement that the rats and vermin threatened to outnumber the birds, deer, wild pigs, and other creatures that also lived there. Each morning, Elisabeth would go to the forest and hand out what little food she had to the hungry. She always brought empty sacks with her and would return at night, the sacks filled with rubbish. Sometimes she came home so late that the stars were beginning to disappear from the sky.

  After months of this, she seemed to shrink under her burden. Weight dropped from her bones, and her glorious brown hair dulled and grew thinner. Rudolph begged her to stop. “You’ve done more than is humanly possible for that place, and you haven’t picked up your sketch pad in months. Won’t you stay here and work with me on the new book?”

  She brushed aside his pleas. “I doubt that there are any wildflowers left in Europe, Rudolph. There’s nothing for me to draw.”

  Sometimes Egon would go with her, but it pained him to watch the futility of one woman trying to save a forest of more than eighteen square miles filled with broken men and, lately, women.

  One afternoon before the Christmas break, he was coming home from school when he saw her tiny figure walking up the road toward their house. When he waved and cried, “Mutti,” she didn’t raise her hand or call back. He ran down the road, ready to relieve her of her sacks of garbage, but when he got closer, he realized she was holding only one bag in her hand, which looked as if it contained few items: her hat, perhaps, or a pair of shoes.

  “Let me help you,” he cried, reaching for the bundle.

  “It weighs nothing,” she said flatly.

  He grabbed the bag. She was right; it felt like a sack full of air.

  “What a surprise that you’ve come home early,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “Papa will be so glad to see you.”

  “You’ll say nothing of this to your papa. I don’t want to upset him.”

  “Nothing of what?”

  “Of what I’m about to show you.” She took the bag from him, untied the rope she had wrapped around its lip, and started pulling things out: several brownish-red feathers, an orange claw, and the charred hollow bones of a medium-sized bird.

  “They’re killing them, Egon,” she said. “The people in that forest are so starved, they’re eating the birds.”

  Egon took his mother’s arm, so tiny now that he could wrap his fingers all the way around it. She leaned against him, shivering. “I thought if I fed them I could stop it. But there are too many of them. They’re freezing and they’re hungry, and now the birds, they’re disappearing.”

  Egon thought about her drawings, thousands of them, each lovingly and meticulously rendered.

  At least she had them, he almost said, but realized how callous that would sound. Instead he asked, “What should we do?”

  “What can we do? Look around you. Shop doors closed. No food, no money, beggars everywhere. No one’s helping the people; they’re surely not going to lift a finger for some poor little birds.”

  “Let’s go home, Mutti,” said Egon, who had his arm around her and was practically carrying her in the direction of their building. “I’ll draw you a bath. You’ll get some sleep. You look exhausted.”

  When they got to the front of their building, Egon hollered for his father to come downstairs. “It’s Mutti; I need your help.”

  Rudolph ran downstairs. When he wrapped his arms around Elisabeth’s waist, she collapsed against his chest. “Precious one,” he said in that voice he used only with her and the animals, “you’re so cold and tired. We must get you upstairs and put you to bed.”

  They helped her up the two flights of stairs. Once inside the flat, Rudolph took off her coat and her shoes and led her to their bed. “Egon, make her some tea,” he ordered, “and bring some bread and butter with the gooseberry jam.” The jam was hidden high up in a cupboard, a treasure in these times, and something they ate only on special occasions.

  When Egon came into their room carrying a tray with the food and drink, his mother was lying down. Her eyes were closed and his father was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in his. He rubbed them against his cheek and then studied her small fing
ers. The old scars, though faded, still covered her hands like tiny peck marks, and her nails were still torn and jagged.

  He leaned over and whispered, “What tortures you so that you pick at your nails?”

  Without opening her eyes, she smiled. Then she answered, “What tortures me so? There is nothing right with the world anymore.”

  He kissed her eyelids. “I know, mein schatz, but I’ll always be here. You sleep now.”

  His mother was already up when Egon awoke to the smell of coffee the next morning. When he came into the kitchen, he saw that her eyes were clear and her long hair was tied back with a blue ribbon. How was it possible that she looked years younger than the woman he had helped up the stairs the day before? “Mutti,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “I am,” she said with a smile. “You and your father make excellent nurses.” He noticed her sketch pad and pencils on the table. The glass eye from her father, which she usually kept in her purse or in a pocket, was lying next to them. “I’ve decided I’m going to work with your father on his new book,” she said. “It’s time for another Schneider collaboration. I’ve never really concentrated on the flowers except when they’ve served as background for the birds. An interesting new adventure for me, don’t you think?”

  Her gaiety seemed forced, but while he was confused about her sudden transformation, he was thrilled to hear the vigor in her voice.

  “That’s wonderful, but now that it’s winter, how will you draw the flowers?”

  “Egon, I’m forty-eight years old. I’ve seen enough flowers to fill a botanical garden.” She tapped her head. “It’s all up here. It still works.”