Tante Eva

not looking at Eva. “I have to take care of my mother first.”
“Of course,” Eva said. “It’s been too long since I’ve visited her. I’m ashamed. I should come by sometime.”
“It’s okay, Eva. You have your bad legs, and my mother—honestly, it’s exhausting for her to have visitors. But yes, we’ll schedule something.” Krista started to leave, and then turned, “Danke, Eva,” she said, “for letting me read the letter to you. I’m excited to see Maggie again, if that would be possible.”
“Selbstverständlich!” said Eva, “Of course. We’ll have dinner together when she comes. It will be my treat.”
Eva thought she saw some color come to Krista’s pale face. As the girl closed the door behind her, Eva sat there holding the letter, looking at Maggie’s lovely handwriting. It was a surprise and it wasn’t a surprise at the same time. She folded the letter very carefully. She’d have to buy stamps today. She still had paper and envelopes. She went to her wardrobe and opened a shallow drawer, putting the letter in it, the drawer of special correspondence. Letters from Hansi, letters that were meaningful, from her brother, from her sister. It was a drawer full of proof of people who had once loved her. She rarely reread any of the letters. It was too emotional. It was almost proof of her own existence. Maggie was most likely coming to see her, in person—something that you can’t put in a drawer.

Chapter 3
She more than enjoyed this niece’s interest in her. She enjoyed the fact that Liezel’s daughter liked her better than she liked her own mother. Schadenfreude toward her own sister. It shamed Eva. She didn’t wish bad things upon Liezel, did she? She couldn’t want her sister to suffer, could she? There had been times when she knew Liezel had suffered, and it broke her heart. When Liezel’s husband, Fred, had a nervous breakdown, from which he never quite recovered. That had been a very rough time in Liezel’s life, and she had written Eva a few letters. She had even called once. When Hugo was alive, they’d had a telephone. Now Eva used the phone in the hallway. That was fine with her. She didn’t need her own phone anymore.
And there was their mother’s death. The gruesomeness of it. Something she tried and managed, mostly, to never think about. She had no say in that matter.
Maggie reminded Eva of her Liezel, but she didn’t say that to Maggie. That was most likely why they didn’t get along—both too headstrong for their own good, full of crazy opinions, not very good listeners. But Liezel knew that about her daughter. Even when Maggie was a little girl, five or six, Liezel would say, “She’s a real handful—so obstinate, and loud, too.”
Eva had only seen pictures of Maggie as a little girl. She didn’t meet her until that summer she studied in Berlin. In the pictures, she looked nothing like Liezel. Liezel would write to Eva, “She looks just like you.” And there in the picture of her niece, Eva would see herself and her long dead mother. The turned-up nose, the blonde hair, the thick eyebrows, the round face. Liezel was dark and Slavic looking—thick-lipped, slightly wide-nosed—like their father. And Eva’s own daughter, Elena, looked like her dead husband, Hugo, with nearly black hair, profoundly dark eyes, and a prominent, narrow nose.
It was almost as if Maggie were hers, in some way. That’s how Eva felt when she saw those pictures and also during those visits in Berlin in the eighties. That Maggie belonged to her somehow. That she’d been born into the wrong family. And Maggie felt that way, too. Sometimes, Eva thought, God sends you gifts. To Eva, Maggie felt like a gift from God, a God who often was unkind, as anyone who’s read the Bible knows. Eva knew suffering, so when something miraculous came along—a niece who was more like an angel, a twin in a different time, as if her own youth were given a new chance at life—she knew to be grateful.
So, she reasoned with herself, it wasn’t just Schadenfreude, her enjoyment of Maggie’s affection. The way she looked, and then later, her political views. She was part of a plan that God had. An act of grace? Eva believed in God, very much. When she married Hugo, an atheist Jew, she more or less abandoned the Catholic Church, but not God. Never did she abandon God. Indeed, she saw His work regularly, saw His hand pass over things. Mostly at night, playing her records—a collection of Negro spirituals and blues recordings that she acquired when Hugo was alive. She’d had access to such things when they weren’t available in the GDR. Hugo had been a beloved photographer, part of the intelligentsia. That was why they had the house—they both knew that—and the ability to get records from the US. Liezel didn’t send them. If she had tried, they wouldn’t have gotten to Eva.
Not that Liezel would have. She was perhaps kind, but not generous. When she left Austria for France and met her American husband, also a student there, and then moved to America, she had abandoned more than the Catholic Church. She abandoned God. Like Hugo. Atheists. Eva had loved Hugo like no one else. Hans was her lover, but Hugo had been the love of her life. She never held his atheism against him. She didn’t even think about it. He was who he was—a Jew who survived World War II, who survived the camps. How could he not be touched by God? It didn’t matter what he believed. God believed in him. That’s what mattered.
But Liezel was different. Her, Eva judged. She actively let go of so much, but she wasn’t as blessed as Hugo, and so, in Eva’s mind, it was a horrible thing. She let go of God, she let go of socialism, and she moved to the country that was responsible for the