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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.
“You get tonight to sulk, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes. But tomorrow, you get up, you get out of bed, and you carry on. It’s not always the strongest trees that survive the storm. Sometimes it’s the trees that bend with the wind. And you, my treasure, find yourself right in a hurricane.” She dropped her voice to the barest of whispers, so faint I had to strain to hear her even though her lips were against my ear as she added, “They insist you become a Nazi, so you pretend to be the best damnedNaziyou can be. You will always know deep down inside what is true and what is right and they cannot touch your heart. But you have no choice now about the facade you present. Your husband and your children are counting on you to play the game.” She pushed back her chair and said firmly, “You just need a strong cup of tea and some sugar. Everything is going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
It didn’t feel like everything was going to be fine, not that night, and not the next morning, when Jürgen and I went through every room of the house, purging mementos of Mayim, erasing her from our lives as we had been instructed to do. I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of the photos and the letters and the birthday cards, so Jürgen did it for me, burning them in the fireplace in the living room, right beside the spot where she liked to sit and read. I kept the knit blanket. It would be my comfort item now, to bring me a different kind of warmth when the world had turned so cold.
Georg said he was happy that Mayim was gone, but I could feel his grief, even if he didn’t know how to make sense of it. He’d wake in the night calling for her, and I’d rush in to find him crying in his sleep. I promised myself that when all of it was over, I’d take him away to the country and I’d undo all of the damage those years were doing to his soul. In truth, I had no idea if that kind of healing was even possible. Isn’t an adult just a child, shaped by experience? Howdoesa person learn not to hate, when that hate has been imprinted upon them from such a young age?
Laura’s grief was as uncompromising as mine at first. “I only want to eat Mayim’s food,” she told me stubbornly, and then it was “I only want Mayim to bathe me” and “I only want Mayim to dress me.” Worst of all was “No, Mama! I only want Mayim’s cuddles,” after she’d scraped her knee one day. But she was five years old, and five-year-olds are, if nothing else, adaptable.
In time, Laura stopped asking for Mayim, and Georg stopped calling out for her at night, and as relieved as I was, it was like losing her all over again.
