Let Me Go by Helga Schneider

give you?"
    "I imagine Fräulein Inge will already have told you what they give me," she cuts me short. "Pills and syrups, that's what. And I'm not actually convinced that they do any good. They want to improve my memory, but what good is it to me?" And she adds astutely, "Everything I want to remember I always find in the usual place, and the rest doesn't interest me."
    There's a moment of silence, and then she gives me an encouraging smile. "So? Don't you want to know more about Birkenau?"
    Now that she's pressing me, I realize that I've run out of questions. But I do feel a faint sense of anxiety at the thought of our imminent separation.
    "What are you thinking about?" she asks solicitously, almost sweetly. She leans forward and grips my hands again.
    But I don't want to make her the gift of my confusion and fall back on one of those stories that have recently crowded into my mind. It was told to me by the protagonist himself.
    "I was thinking about someone I know . . ."
    "Who?" This time she's the one who looks me straight in the eyes, and I'm forced to avert my gaze.
    "A friend," I reply.
    "Why were you thinking about him?"
    "He was deported to Auschwitz at the age of eighteen; he was castrated." And I quickly free my hands from hers.
    She draws back with a puff of irritation. "Castrated in Auschwitz?" she asks, scornful and incredulous. "He's been telling you a pack of lies."
    This time I explode. "They exposed his reproductive organs to X-rays for twenty minutes, giving him very severe burns, and then they removed his testicles to dissect them and examine them under a microscope. Are you going to deny that they experimented with the sterilization of human beings in Auschwitz?"
    "It's a lie!" she insists. And clarifies: "Some things were only done in Ravensbrück."
    "And what about Mengele?" I remind her. "Doesn't that name mean anything to you?"
    "Mengele?" she echoes, as though shifting the word from one side of her mouth to the other. "Never heard of him."
    I feel as if I'm being provoked, played for a fool.
    "And Meyer, Kaschub, Langben, Heyde, Renno, Brandt—do those names mean nothing either?"
    Her mouth is thin and hard. "Never heard of them. I don't know who you're talking about."
    She frowns and folds her arms. "And anyway I don't want to talk to you anymore; you've annoyed me now."
    She gets to her feet, apparently in a terrible mood all of a sudden. She takes a few steps through the room. She walks upright, apparently quite steady on her feet. She walks over to an ornamental plant and starts picking off red berries and popping them slowly between her fingers.
    "Say something nice to her," Eva hisses to me, "you must leave her in a balanced state of mind."
    She's right. But while I'm searching for something conciliatory to say, I hear her muttering. "You've never once called me Mutti." She wipes her hands with a handkerchief and repeats, "You say you're my daughter and you've never once called me Muttil"
    She comes over to me and asks in a hurt and doleful voice, "Am I not your mother?" And with a certain mischief she starts pinching my cheek as though I were a little girl. I nod mechanically, and she starts shrieking, "Then you have to call me Muttii Everyone else's children call their mothers Mutti, and you have to call me Mutti too. I want you to."
    She crosses her arms over her chest and assumes a domineering expression. I feel helpless, caught off guard. I can't call her Mutti. I can't do it.
    "I'm waiting," she insists, in the intransigent voice of someone who is sure of her rights. I could reply that everyone else's children have probably had a lifetime to get used to calling their mothers Mutti, but I'm afraid of annoying her.
    "I can't say it," I decide to admit.
    "You can't call me Mutti?" she scoffs.
    "I'm not used to it," I answer, shrugging my shoulders.
    "I want you to call your mother Muttii" she insists. It comes across as capricious, nothing more than that. "If you don't, I'm going to leave