Let Me Go by Helga Schneider Read Free Book Online

wardrobe with solemn nostalgia, asking me to try it on. I had refused.
    "All my suits are that color," she continues, as if by way of small talk. "This one's the nicest."
    Meanwhile Fräulein Inge has picked up the flowers and put them in a vase.
    "Now," she says, "you'd be better off moving to the guest room, where you can talk to each other in peace."
    My mother protests. "No, I don't want to go there. It's a nasty room, nasty and cold."
    "It's neither nasty nor cold," replies Fräulein Inge, "and apart from anything else you always go there with your friend."
    "I have no friends!"
    "Isn't Frau Freihorst your friend?"
    My mother makes a contemptuous gesture: "She's nothing."
    "You shouldn't treat loyal friends like that," Fräulein Inge says disapprovingly.
    "Pffff! I'm not going into that room because that's where I felt ill; I had a heart attack."
    Fraulein Inge smiles indulgently. "You've never had a heart attack, thank the Lord."
    "Of course I have. I nearly died."
    I glance, puzzled, at Fräulein Inge, who explains, "She'd just stuffed herself with ice cream; it was indigestion."
    "That's not true!" shrieks my mother, outraged.
    "You mustn't tell lies," the Fräulein replies severely. "And that's enough of your nonsense now. I'm going to go with you to the guest room." Gripping my mother's wrist, she invites Eva and me to follow her.
    The minute we're inside, my mother digs in her heels like a mule and scrutinizes me grimly. "What did you do with the teddy bear?" she asks.
    WHEN FRAU FREIHORST had opened the door of my mother's apartment, my heart had skipped a beat. I had emerged from that place twenty-seven years previously, convinced that I would never set foot there again, and yet here I was, crossing that threshold once more.
    We walked into the hall, then into the sitting room.
    There was the table where my son had sat, five years old at the time, with his crayons and a coloring book that my mother had given him, together with a glass of milk and a pile of chocolate cookies arranged on a big plate with a decorated border.
    The same furniture as before, and cloths draped over the white armchairs. The sight chilled me. I looked around with a combination of dismay and revulsion; and yet there was something obscurely familiar about the place. All of a sudden I had the feeling that I was suffocating. Frau Freihorst hurried to open a window. I breathed deeply and stood there for a moment to look down at the courtyard below.
    It was a narrow Viennese courtyard, bare and unadorned. Nineteenth-century windows were set in the cracked walls, their sills decorated with sparse pots of evergreens.
    An old man with long white hair, sitting on a tiled surface above the gas meters, was eating a sandwich wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, every now and again throwing crumbs to a group of sparrows.
    "Are you all right?" asked Eva, beside me.
    "I'm a bit thrown," I replied.
    "Would you like to have a look at the bedroom?" I heard Frau Freihorst saying behind me. I nodded.
    The minute I walked in I was struck by an atmosphere of icy solitude. I was chilled to the bone and felt as though I was violating someone's private property. Indeed, that was what I was doing: My mother would never know of this intrusion.
    The room was orderly but neurotically so, with the kind of sterility that seems final and irrevocable. The head of the household had gone. The dust could take over again.
    I looked around with a mixture of curiosity and unease. My mother's furniture, her things. The wardrobe in which she kept her SS uniform. There was a chest with three big drawers, a little inlaid dressing table, a broad bed with an immaculate chenille bedspread, and long curtains of fine fabric on both windows. A walnut bookcase held several volumes, including some highly respectable titles.
    Frau Freihorst explained that my mother was an avid reader. "She even read in . . ." She broke off and blushed slightly.
    I encouraged her with a slightly forced