the fire and she went off into a trance like this, my mother got really angry. She shouted: “Stop this ridiculous dreaming!” and Henrietta looked up and said quietly: “What’s the matter? I simply don’t want to play any more,” and threw the cards she was still holding into the fire. My mother picked the cards out of the fire, burning her fingers as she did so, and salvaged them all except for the seven of hearts, which was singed, and we could never play cards again without thinking of Henrietta, although my mother tried to behave “as if nothing had happened.” She is not spiteful at all, just incredibly stupid, and stingy. She would not allow us to buy a new pack of cards, and I assume the scorched seven of hearts is still in that pack and that my mother is quiet unconcerned when it turns up while she is playing patience. I would have like to phone Henrietta, but the theologians have not yet invented this kind of dialing. I looked up my parents’ number, which I always forget, in the phone book: Schnier, Alfons, Dr., Managing Director. The “Dr.” was something new—it must be an honorary degree. WhileI was dialing the number I walked home in my mind’s eye, down Koblenzstrasse, turning into the Ebertallee, then to the left toward the Rhine. Barely half an hour’s walk. I heard the maid’s voice:
“Dr. Schnier’s residence.”
“May I speak to Mrs. Schnier?” I said.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Hans Schnier,” I said, “son of the lady in question.” She swallowed, thought for a moment, and I felt along the four miles of telephone wires that she was hesitating. She smelled very nice, incidentally, just of soap, and a little fresh nail polish. Obviously she knew of my existence, but she had been given no positive instructions about me. Probably only dark rumors in her ear: outsider, a radical type.
“Would you please assure me,” she finally asked, “that this is not a joke?”
“You may rest assured,” I said, “if need be I am willing to give details of my mother’s distinguishing marks. A mole on the left side of her face under her mouth, a wart …”
She laughed and said: “All right!” and switched me through. Our telephone system is a complicated one. My father alone has three extensions: a red phone for the brown-coal, a black one for the stock exchange, and a private one, white. My mother has only two phones: a black one for the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences, and a white one for private use. Although my mother has a private bank account running into six figures, the telephone bills (and of course her traveling expenses to Amsterdam and elsewhere) are charged to the Executive Committee. The maid had used the wrong switch, my mother answered the black telephone in her business voice: “Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences.”
I was speechless. If she had said: “Mrs. Schnier speaking,” I would probably have answered; “Hans here, how are you,Mother?” Instead I said: “I am a delegate of the Executive Committee of Jewish Yankees, just passing through—may I please speak to your daughter?” I even startled myself. I heard my mother exclaim, then she sighed in a way which told me how old she has become. She said: “I suppose you can never forget that, can you?” I was almost in tears myself and said softly: “Forget? Ought I to, Mother?” She was silent, all I could hear was that old woman’s weeping that shocked me so much. I had not seen her for five years and she must be over sixty by now. For a moment I had really believed she could put me through to Henrietta. She is always saying that perhaps she has “a private line to heaven”; she says it archly, the way everyone these days talks about their private lines: a private line to the Party, to the university, to television, to the Ministry of the Interior.
I would have liked to hear Henrietta’s voice so