Free The Archivist by Martha Cooley Page B

fact.”
    “Why?” I said.
    “We had a large fight. I was working at the time, in Manhattan, for a small poetry press. I’d gone to visit my parents, and I was looking through some photo albums when I came across a couple of pictures of my grandparents — both sets, the Lansmanns and the Spiers. I’d known those photos since I was little. There were several of the Spiers, all taken on Marienburger Allee in Charlottenburg — right in front of their house. But the one photo of the Lansmanns, the only one my parents had kept, was taken in another neighborhood of Berlin. I began wondering where. At first I thought Kreuzberg, which is close to Charlottenburg, but then I remembered my mother telling me that her parents’ house had sat on a steep side street — Kreuzberg is quite hilly — and I figured the photo must’ve been taken somewhere else, because the background wasn’t right. My grandparents were standing to one side of some kind of big building. It had the look of a church — and it had obviously been badly damaged. All its windows were busted and there was a lot of fire damage. The picture was taken from across the street — a wide one, like a boulevard — so the Lansmanns themselves were small and not too distinct. But the building was so big that it didn’t all fit into the picture. I was staring at it, wondering. Then I flipped it over and saw that my mother had written ‘November 1938’ on the back. With parentheses around it.
    “And I got it. Something about the date, in parentheses — it was those parentheses that did it. I had this weird feeling inside my rib cage. For a minute I had trouble inhaling, I felt a little dizzy. Suddenly this possibility had entered my mind, this suspicion, and it was such an immense thing with so many implications that my body kind of seized up, like a clutch you shift too fast and the gears lock, you know, and the engine stalls. I felt stalled.
    “My mother came into the room just as I was sitting there, holding this photo. My parents had told me lots of stories about my grandparents, about life in Berlin. My mother’s stories were of walking along the Spree, of long Sunday-afternoon picnics in the Tiergarten after church. My father’s stories were of the Schleicher children, his playmates in Marienburger Allee, and their uncle Dietrich in jail, murdered for his Christian ideals. And I’d believed everything: the church stories, picnic stories, the stories of how both my grandfathers — men in their early fifties — had managed to evade military service by faking illnesses; the stories of Berlin bombed, of electricity blackouts and coal shortages and the constant hunger. And the stories of my parents’ move to Holland after the war finally ended, to make a better life. And of how they’d heard about the deaths of their parents, my four grandparents, between 1946 and 1949. All four died of natural causes, my mother had said.
    “All of it — I’d swallowed every word, and suddenly here was this familiar photograph with a date in parentheses on the back, written in pencil by my mother. The whole house of cards came tumbling down. I looked up at her. She must’ve noticed something was wrong because she said
what?
quietly, and then again
what?
, and I kept staring at her. Finally I was able to use my mouth, which had gone all gummy and dry.
    “Kristallnacht
, I said.
This is that synagogue in all the history books. On Orianenburger Strasse.
And after a moment, she said
yes
.
    “You were
, I said — and I was shaking my head in disbelief but I knew I was right —
no, are, you are Jewish. No
, she said,
were, we were but that was in another life.
    “I looked away for a minute and the room sort of lurched and I looked back. My mother was very pale.
    “Why didn’t you
, I started to say, but she cut in with something like
why should we, what’s the point, it’s all past, over, don’t you see, we made a new life here —
and then her face crumpled and