Berlin, 1945 and 1947, East Kingston, 2015

From: A Cartography of What Is Left: A German Lyric

My father had, over the course of many decades, a dozen depressions that I know of. Even if you survive, wars take a toll.

They began in 1947, in Berlin. Father left his room as little as possible. He was thirteen. If he made it to school, he was late. He lay on his bed and slept or read all day. Karl May’s books, Winnetou and Old Surehand. He complained of one ache or the other. Ear. Stomach. Throat. He pulled the curtains shut. Made the room dark.

As a kid, in Peru, I could hear him wandering around the house in the middle of the night, the cigarette stench drifting up into my bedroom, my hair.

Later, he would take to bed for the weekend, or weeks on end. Or he would park himself on the baby blue settee in the TV room, in front of Judge Judy, and pull at his cuticles, pick at scabs on his hands. I don’t know when the scabs started showing up. His early sixties, maybe? But I know why they never healed.

The last couple of years of his life, he sat in an assisted

living facility in Rhode Island, picked at his scabs and wept. Dementia. Depression.

He was not allowed to watch the news or read the front section of The New York Times. When a Brazilian soccer team fell out of the sky in Colombia, he wailed. Implacable. He had to be restrained, sedated. After that he was restricted to Living and Health.

When I visited months later, the nurses had a need to tell me about it. He’d frightened them so.

“He kept slapping his head — hard. Oh, it was terrifying! He was bruised for days.”

Correction. It was not he who had frightened them, but all that was inside him.

Two years before he entered the facility, I visited, as I often did, and not often enough. At that time, my stepmother could still take care of Father at home. I found him in the living room, the New York Times expertly folded in one hand. He couldn’t tell me what was in the paper, but he read it diligently cover to cover.

I touched his hand and said: “Wie geht’s?” How is it going? Trying to make up with the intimacy of the language we share for my absence and indifference.

He had walked out on my mother late in life for the chance at happiness with an uncomplicated American woman with little baggage and a love for penguins. They were on towels, on mugs. My siblings and I were left to manage my mother. But Mother is another story.

That day with my father in Rhode Island, I felt such pity. Such aching affection. When not depressed, he’d been an intellectual thunderstorm. I held his hand, the skin on the dorsum thin and translucent. One large Band-Aid across his

knuckles. He made himself bleed relentlessly.

“Wie geht’s Dir?” I added softly, insisting, making up for his silence. How are you?

He looked up, and although he sometimes did not know who I was, he had me in focus.

“Claudia, er war ein Offizier? Ja?” He was an officer, yes? “Der Russe?” The Russian?

In Berlin, in the fall of 1945, a Russian officer came to “visit,” for lack of a better word, my grandmother. Repeatedly.

Her husband was dead. Her apartment had survived the bombings. Only a panel in the front door was broken, kicked in by the Russians.

Every time the officer “visited,” he took Grandmother into the living room. Maybe he pulled her, pushed her. I do not know. After that, the living room door stayed shut, and Father was told to remain in his room. Soldiers waited in the vestibule. They smoked and whispered in Russian. How many? Two. Three. Depending on the day.

Sometimes, one soldier sat down on Father’s bed. The soldier fingered toys and books, tracing illustrations. He stank. His hands were dirty. Nails black.

I heard this story first in my twenties. Bits from him. Bits from her. Back then, I could stomach it all. I was a relentless little journalist, intent on getting all the details. Grandmother was uncooperative, insisting the officer was a gentleman, vehemently denying any wrongdoing, any suffering.

When I pushed, she said firmly: “Genug.” Enough.

So what was I to do with Father’s question? Was the Russian in the living room an officer? Meaning: Was he a gentleman?

Meaning: Did he rape her? Yes or no? Sixty-nine years later, my demented father wants — no, needs — to know.

I reassured him, repeating his words, the ones he held on to.

“That Russian was an officer”, I said. He was an officer, not Russian riffraff.

I held Father’s hand, caressing the parts that were not scabrous with my thumb, repeating: “Er war ein in Offizier. Ja, ein Offizier.”

In 2003, a war memoir was published in Germany, later translated into English. That is how I came to understand what probably happened in that living room. A Woman in Berlin. My grandmother was also a woman in Berlin. In the months after the war ended, one million Berliner women and girls were raped by the Russians, some of them repeatedly. Sometimes, there was an exchange. A cigarette. Mostly not.

When I had finished the book, I called my father. He told me he had read about it in The New York Times. I offered to mail him my copy.

Agitated, he said: “Don’t.”

And he did not want to talk about Grandmother either.

And because I can be so thoughtless, I went on to say that the memoir mentioned that many of the victims were children, some very young.

“Das stimmt,” he said. It’s true. “The girls in my building. I heard the screaming.”

“How long did it go on?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice flat and tired. “Forever.”

In his last months, they had to inject him with something every day. To calm him down. He upset the other patients, the

nurses said. Some stories are too hard to bear. The doctors said Father died from complications secondary to pneumonia and cardiac arrest. But he cried and cried — for how long? Three years? More?