Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman Page B

think? And you are going to sing along with my playing, in your full-throated “steam bath” voice. And, whoever does not like it can just buzz off. We are definitely going to like it!
    She dreams of everything they shared, a dream that she nourishes as the world around her becomes increasingly nightmarish and the past becomes the only sharp, clear, beautiful thing she can think of:
I live through all the different phases of our being together. Do you remember? The Friday nights. When we went to your Mama’s house. All the other evenings in your place. Everything you did. Do you remember? Talking. How can we without money . . . ? Skiing classes . . . The different relationships between us we lived, together . . . And this time cannot be over yet darling. I beg you . . . tell me. That this cannot be. It is impossible don’t you agree? It cannot be. Darling?! I think about all those things and I ask myself in which phase of your life you are right now.
    I show these letters to friends in Vienna and Berlin. One friend tells me they are too personal to translate. Not only because Valy was trapped, but also because she did not sound like a woman who fully believed herself to be loved, to be supported, to be cared for. “You are and remain far, far away, out of my reach, you exist only in my memories, in my wonderful, beautiful ‘sunny past.’”
    Even more than emigration, Valy just wants the past to no longerbe past. She meanders for pages, she reminds him of the poetry they read together, the books they debated. “Do you remember? Once, many years ago, we were walking through the Prater, it was in October, and you recited the Oktoberlied for me, talking about the overcast day which we wanted to make golden. . . . We were so happy then, or, at least, I was. With you, I never was quite sure how things were.”
    I am struck, seventy years on, by the poignancy of that insecurity. My grandfather was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, by the time she wrote those lines. It was fall 1941. By then his medical practice had been open a year, he was settling into his new life, he was dating my smart, pretty grandmother, who had gone to Smith College and then transferred—it was still the Depression, after all, and Smith was pricey—to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants (one Russian, one Latvian) who made a solid living selling wallpaper and paint. Her mother had been a businesswoman in her own right, as a fashion buyer in her early twenties; in all, the Kolmans were a very American, quiet-success story.
    In Berlin, in the meantime, Valy was entirely living in the past, comforted only by a phantom version of Karl, a shadow version of their relationship that had long since become as one-dimensional as his photograph.

    I discuss all this with Herbert Posch—the life my grandfather created, the life he left behind, the eventual American wife, the girlfriend, the lies, the omissions, the sadness—and he listens, quietly. I wonder aloud about what Karl told my grandmother, and what he knew about where Valy was during the war, and after it. I raise for him the questions that have been consuming me—about my grandfather’s lovers, about his guilt, or his lack of guilt.
    I tell him that as a teen I made a pilgrimage with my parents to my grandfather’s former home, Rueppgasse 27, a street that, to my seventeen-year-old eyes, seemed gray and uninteresting:  poor . We tookthe train from Munich to Vienna on that trip—schlepping a million bags from train to train. I remember thinking, I say, How odd, how disturbing, to be asked for papers and passports in German . In Vienna, my father went to the bank, to withdraw money. My grandfather, I learned only then, had squirreled away money outside America, should he need to flee again. This was a bewildering thought—Karl had not been sure enough of the United States to entrust our banks with all of what he earned. Instead, he