The German Girl

Anna and her mother go through the photos that Hannah sent them. Anna notes that her mother has been much less depressed since the arrival of the photos. The pictures depict “smashed window shops, the Star of David, glass shards everywhere, graffiti on walls, puddles of muddy water, a man fleeing the camera” (52). Anna’s mother tells Anna about the night of November 9, 1938, the night they smashed window shops and separated families in Berlin. “They left behind their homes, their lives. Very few survived,” Hannah’s mother says (53). When Anna goes to sleep that night, she has a nightmare that she is drowning in the middle of the ocean. In the dream she tries to swim to safety on an island where her dad awaits. When she wakes up, her mother is by her side. Her mother asks what she would like to do for her birthday. Anna proposes that they go to Cuba together. Anna’s mother says that she’ll talk to Aunt Hannah the next day.

Hannah meets Leo at the train station. The streets are crowded with people, and music is playing over the loudspeakers in celebration of the birthday of “the purest man in Germany” (62). At the station, Leo excitedly tells Hannah that the two of them are bound for Cuba, which he thinks is spelled, “K-h-u-b-a” (60). Hannah wonders where Cuba is. Leo talks to Hannah “about marriage, having children, living together” (61), even though he has never proposed to her. Leo then mocks a military procession making its way down the street in honor of “the purest” man’s birthday. Airplanes streak by overhead. The streets are so crowded that Hannah and Leo can barely move. When Hannah arrives home, she looks for “Khuba” on a map but can’t find it. Hannah reflects that her father health seems to be ailing. She worries that she’ll become an orphan who will “have to look after a depressed mother who never stopped weeping over her days of lost glory” (63).

Anna’s mother talks with Hannah. They decide to meet. Anna reflects on the qualities that her mother says her father possessed. He was apparently shy and quiet, and didn’t drink, smoke, or dance. Spanish was his first language, English his second. He obtained American citizenship because his father was born in New York. He enjoyed films by Italian directors such as Visconti, Antonioni, and De Sica, and enjoyed Madonna’s music. Anna’s mother met him at a “concert of baroque music at Columbia University, where she taught classes in Latin American Literature” (67). Anna’s mother gives Anna a box full of her father’s possessions. One contains a love letter from her father to her mother. The love letter recounts the first time he saw her mother at an “autumn concert in Saint Paul’s Chapel at the university” (68). At the end of the letter, her father expresses his desire that they one day travel the world together.