Ilka

           “Today,” Ilka said, “my Maggie is finally getting her Austrian citizenship.”

           “Congratulations!” “Great!” “That’s won­derful!” said the Zoom gallery of friends. They were back on their computers.

           “I guess,” Ilka said. “It seemed to take years of consultations with consulates, documentations. Her birth certificate had to be certified, et cetera, et cetera, a lot of et ceteras.”

           “You didn’t apply for citizenship for yourself?”

Ilka said, “I did not. I was remembering my parents’ desperation assembling the papers that were required for our emigration — the morning post that didn’t bring the essential documents before the expiration of two other ­essential ­documents.”

           “Austria had annulled our citizenship. It bemused me to have been not only stateless but unnatural until I became a naturalized American.”

           “But that’s not what the word means,” Bridget said. “It means a plant growing naturally where it’s not indigenous.”

Ilka said, “Maggie has bought her ticket to Vienna, where I was ­indigenous.”

           “And you’re not going?”

I                 llka said, “You remember how we said no more trains, no more planes?”

           “But you’ve been back?”

           “I used to go.”

           “And how was that?”

           “Intensely exciting—the child-in-the-candy-store kind of exciting. I would deposit my bags in the hotel and shoot back out the door in search of a certain palace I remembered on the other side of the street, or a tower glimpsed in the other direction, but I’d get waylaid by an archway and stop to look into a shadowy courtyard with an old water cistern. I remember looking through one open door at a monumental Baroque male supporting the central staircase on his bare back.

           “The Viennese dialect of my childhood sounded helplessly dear. The taxi-driver from the airport told me I was lucky that I had got away before the Russians came. My hosts were kind and eager, the children, or grandchildren, surely, of erstwhile anti-Nazis, but by the third day I wanted to be out of there and was glad to find my seat on the plane taking me back to my adoptive New York.”

           “That had naturalized you,” Bridget said.

•

Ilka said, “You’ve all seen our family portrait. Let me go get it and I’ll show you. Maggie spent the weekend with me.”

          She held it up in front of the monitor. “You see how the photographer has staged the fifteen children — fourteen, actually, because Karl, the youngest, was not born yet — around the father standing behind the seated mother. The three oldest girls are Great Aunt Berta, this is the one I call Mali, and Rosa. I’ve told you about the Sunday afternoons we used to spend in Tante Mali’s apartment with my mother’s cousins.”

Farah said, “The aunt who had a ­stereopticon?”

          “Who let you mess with the beads on her curtains,” remembered Bessie.

          Ilka said, “The little Onkel Löwy would open the front door into the foyer and show us into the room where Tante Mali with the lovely face, immensely overweight, always sat in the same chair at the big table watching us. You see, in the picture, she is the one with the sweet look. She and Onkel Löwy ended up in Mauthausen.

          “Sitting on her left, that’s my grandmother Rosa, around fifteen, maybe. She and the four-year-old Poldi on the low stool would make it out and get to New York. They and the brother who went to Canada before the First World War, and a brother who died of lung disease, were the four ‘survivors’ of my grandmother’s generation.

          “All the boys in the picture — what age would you say, between seven and seventeen? — have had their heads shaved for the photograph and wear big bow ties. No way for me to tell Maggie which one grew up to be Gigerl, who got away to Canada, or Miklosz, who had the bookshop, or Szandor, married to Tante Mali, who had twins, one of whom, Willi, lives in Israel. Which and what was the name of the uncle who had a photo shop with a Bauhaus-style interior?”

•

“Maggie is in Vienna, in Wien,” Ilka told her friends on their next Zoom. “She has taken the best I can do in the way of a family tree — the old, broken leather address book — and seems to know how to do the research I didn’t do. Was it Rotenturm or Sterngasse where my parents lived after I left? My grandparents moved in with them after the Nazis Aryanized Grandfather’s house and shop.

          “Maggie e-mails that it was ­Rotenstern Strasse. She e-mails me the street names of my childhood — Albert Gasse, where I went to school. The bookshop was in the Wollzeile. She has sent a picture of a block of flats. Do I recognize No. 8 Holland Strasse, Tante Mali’s address? I don’t. I remember the stereopticon, the tall blue tile stove in the corner, the drapes with the wooden beads, the smiling Tante Mali who sat and watched us.”

•

“A note from Maggie,” says Ilka. “­Maggie has visited the Wiesenthal Institute, which keeps the records. Not Mauthausen, as I said. ‘On September 24, 1942, Amalie and Maximilian Löwy were deported to Theresienstadt. Deported to Auschwitz, May 16, 1944, where they perished.’

          “Where they perished,” Ilka says and is silent.

          She imagines the days, the week expecting the knock, the banging on the front door. Two uniforms stand outside, walk through the door, they are inside the foyer—the men Hannah Arendt means, doing a job? They transport the old couple to where men will sport with them before they kill them. Ilka tries not to imagine Tante Mali, who needs help getting up from her chair, forced to run to the right, turn and run left. To imagine the men? Not Dante, not Milton, not Shakespeare has anatomized their human hearts, and about what she cannot imagine she cannot think and I cannot write.