Read Online Too Jewish by Patty Friedmann - Free Book Online Page B

with Martha out from behind the counter fanning me with a packet of papers, that I learned my mother was not necessarily dead. Ambiguously living. The cablegram said she had been transported to Bergen-Belsen three weeks earlier. "I think that means she's alive, don't you?" was the first thing I really heard Ted saying.
    I sat up. All I knew right then was that I'd lost all chance of getting her out of Germany. She'd probably known that was coming; that was why she told me not to sell the ring. I didn't want to think about what being trapped in Germany meant. Bergen-Belsen wasn't a death sentence for a young person, but being shipped to any camp seemed to me to be a death sentence for a seventy-year-old woman. Though in one of the last conversations I'd had with my mother she had assured me that she was not old.
    "Not knowing is very difficult," Martha said to Ted. She told me I could write a letter, and the Red Cross would try to deliver it. I asked if it would come back if it couldn't be delivered. Martha said she didn't think so.
    I thanked her. I asked her whether I could come back before I shipped out. She said I could, knowing I wouldn't. I knew I wouldn't, too, except maybe to see Martha, just for herself.
    After we were out on the sidewalk, I said to Ted, "I have just learned that some things are better not knowing."
    * * *
    I could not tell anyone, but I knew I was being assigned to London. I had ten days, and in spite of myself I didn't want to leave Letty. I never had allowed myself to do more than kiss her, and even in my daydreams I never went farther because I didn't want to love her with passion, but I'd begun to love her with an ache I'd never felt before. Needing and wanting always had been confused in my mind when it came to girls, and I'd generally wanted them more. I needed Letty, her wit more than anything. For a schooled girl, she wasn't all that schooled, choosing to study psychology as if it were science, and managing not to know literature and philosophy any more than to cite names she'd seen on lists. But she could think, and really all I wanted was someone who could take the quotidian and pick it apart with as much nuance as Voltaire. She saw the world right. Right was important. She always said the right thing. Not just to me. In fact what she said to me was the least of it. I liked what she said to other people the most. She wasn't in her parents' thrall. She was controlled by them, but she didn't believe in them. I believed in respect, but not respect that wasn't rational. Letty had figured out how to be rational all on her own. I was falling in love with her, and it wasn't rational at all, not if I planned to go back to New York after London. She was part of my New Orleans experience, and I couldn't imagine separating the two. I needed to prepare us both for saying goodbye.
    We were out in her car sitting by the lake the night I went to the Red Cross. I wasn't going to hide the news about my mother. "So the cable said she was shipped to Bergen-Belsen. That was the word. Shipped. Like chattel."
    "Oh, God, I feel sick," Letty said, and for a second I didn't connect what I said with how she felt. I reached for the inside light. "What's the matter?" I said.
    She turned the light off gently. "I feel horrible for you," she said. Then she thought about it. "Now don't get me wrong. I feel horrible because, well, that's horrible. But I've been reading. A lot. Bergen-Belsen is all right. As camps go."
    I had made a point of not following any of the news on the continent. Ted thought I was out of my mind when he would comment on a development in Europe, and I would not know the particulars. I didn't want to know anything about the war beside my mother's whereabouts and my own assignment. "I don't want to know about it," I said, hoping she'd ignore me.
    "Bergen-Belsen isn't an extermination camp," Letty said. "The Red Cross visits there. It's sort of a Potemkin Village." She looked at me to see if I knew what