Paper Love by Sarah Wildman

Author:Sarah Wildman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Both winter and spring might pass, perhaps

and next summer too, and the whole year,

but sometime you will come, I know for sure,

and I shall wait, as I promised before.

I cry, listening to it. I imagine Valy hoped my grandfather would take out a recording of this song and think of her in the countryside. My father, when I tell him of the song, gives a start. “Peer Gynt?” he says. “How odd. It was on often in the house.”

Perhaps Valy and my grandfather sang it to each other once, perhaps they saw the play together. But now the words “and I shall wait, as I promised before” have so much more weight to them. Later the song promises—she will wait alone, even if it is in the world to come. Its promise of a deathly meeting, if not on the earth itself, is both beautiful and terrible. I can see her, the Burgfräulein, in her cupola, looking out over the wooded glen, wishing terribly she could share the moment with Karl, wishing she could abandon even this oasis for the uncertainty of the road, or the sea, with a valid passport, affidavit, and visa in hand.

There is so much Valy does not include, or at least is not explicit about. It is beneath the surface, if my grandfather had known to look for it. The importance of her mother’s position, her delight in simply having a room—they are clues to the privations of the Judenhäuser. The scramble for papers—the reevaluation of the affidavits—as Jews are even more panicked now that Western Europe is rapidly falling to Germany. Diarist Victor Klemperer, the month earlier, expressed the doom of the period in his journals: “The successes in the West are prodigious, and the nation is intoxicated. All Holland, half of Belgium taken . . . in the market hall they’re saying Hitler will speak in London on May 26.”

France falls in June, and in Berlin, Jews are banned from the major parks; the Nazis have stolen their homes, their clothing, their livelihoods, and now, it seems, they are stealing the very air around them, their ability to breathe, to walk, to be outdoors. By autumn, London will not fall, but be pummeled with bombs.

For Valy, her losses—freedom and love—compound each other. We have all had this yearning, I think, as I read and reread her letters. We have all been desperate for love, felt love was lost before we were ready to let it go. We have all felt that sense of—stupidity and childishness, rage and hopelessness—around love. But for Valy it becomes the only thing left, so she draws it carefully, underscores it, writes around it, highlights it, again and again. She still loves him, but she is uncertain of him, she wants him to know what she is going through, but more than anything, she wants to know she has something to look forward to, to live for—with everything in her world upended, she needs him to remain a constant.

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