"Do you think Zickelbart is in there?"

           Distracted from my efforts to open the window, I glanced at my brother. He was poking around in one of the boxes we pulled out of our parents’ closet.

"Zickelbart?" I laughed. "That’s all we need."

           Zickelbart was one of a host of ghosts we had inherited from our parents. You might say one can’t inherit ghosts. But our ghosts were as substantial as anything else in the huge pile of things more politely referred to as the "estate."

           The ancient air conditioner sputtered and groaned, reinforcing the sense of sitting below a laundry vent. Of course, my parents, inured to what they considered irrelevant minor discomforts, never replaced the unit. They got a new stove only because the old gas stove blew up; we later learned that the gas pipe had corroded. The refrigerator was a relic from the 1950s; my brothers and I finally pooled our funds and replaced it in 1987. For visitors, served tea from elegant silver tea sets in the stately living room filled with antique furniture, this insistence on frugality was bewildering and incomprehensible. For us, it was infuriating.

           The window was stuck. It took all the strength I had to push it up. The air from the city streets was warm and heavy with humidity. Yet, when I poked my head outside, staring at 57th Street and York Avenue, the sense of relief was immediate. For a few moments I soaked in the sounds of traffic heading toward the bridge, sirens wailing, cars honking, and buses hissing and squealing as they stopped and lurched forward again.

I turned back into the room. The acrid smell of my brother’s cigars mingled with the fumes from a whiskey glass on the coffee table next to an ashtray filled with butts and crumpled up foil paper. Dust tickled my nose. Boxes were strewn all over the carpet. Pop music from a portable radio on my father’s desk blocked out some of the traffic noise.

The contrast was jarring.

Until my mother’s death in 2009, my father’s library had always been a serene oasis. It had retained that quality even after his death ten years earlier. This room, more than any other in my parents’ home, reflected a perfect blend of their respective sensibilities and interests, a marriage of two minds. Undaunted by tall ceilings and ugly air conditioning units, my mother had chosen simple grey curtains with narrow trims in reds and blues and painted the walls in a light blue-grey. She and my father spent hours hanging the etchings of all the generals in opposition to Napoleon, with a double-headed eagle clock in the center. Bookshelves lined the walls up to the ceiling and were filled with books ranging from ancient history to the French Revolution, Russian literature, the Medici, and entire shelves of books on German history, in particular the 1930s and 1940s. On one of the top shelves, my mother arranged a collection of Nymphenburg porcelain horses and riders, stark white against the blue-grey background, some with falcons on their fists, others with hounds running alongside.

My father’s desk gave the feeling its owner had just left it a few minutes earlier, with its array of a leather folder, a silver inkpot, miscellaneous silver jars for pens and pencils, and piles of scrap paper he used for his notes. If I blinked, I could picture my father sitting over a book, so absorbed that he was oblivious to the world around him, while my mother placed the tea tray on the coffee table, covered with piles of art catalogues from her work as an art reporter. When she made tea just for the two of them, she used a pair of Meissen teacups, so fine and thin they were almost translucent, and the perfume of bergamot and Earl Grey or in winter a faint smoky tang of Lapsang Souchong filled the room. I loved the slices of toast and jam, an essential part of afternoon tea.

Now, my brother Agostino and I had to face the task of dealing with the liquidation of the estate. The time had come to clean the apartment and get it ready so we could put it on the market. I dreaded this process. In better days, while my brother Adrian was alive, he and I had often laughed and commiserated with each other about the task that awaited us, aware of the work involved as well as the emotionally wrenching process of tearing apart our parents' world.

I was sickened by the thought of pawing through my mother’s things.

Tired and drained after having cleared out Adrian's apartment after his death less than two months earlier, I had reached the point where I wished I could wave a wand and be done with it all. I had already collected stacks of bills and records and begun to work through the mountains of paperwork piled up in my office. My parents’ penchant for buying supplies that would last them into the next millennium, less politely expressed as hoarding, did not come as a surprise. Meanwhile, the contents of the walk-in closet, in family parlance the archive, far exceeded anything I could have imagined.

All afternoon, we worked on emptying out the large space. Trunks, rolled up rugs, cases of wine and whiskey, Yardley lavender soap, coffee bought in bulk, cans of tomato juice bulging with age, miscellaneous art posters, a wooden box filled with cakes of barrel soap, an unwieldy metal file cabinet stuffed with papers some of which dated back to the early 1800s, formal gowns, golden silk curtain panels, brittle and stiff with dirt, and elderberry juice containers ordered from Europe—we called it "ant syrup" when we were children. Everything smelled musty, coated with the dust of decades mixed with New York City soot that blew through the inadequately sealed windows.

My mother's presence in the apartment was palpable. Any moment she might come around the corner with the tea tray, reprimanding us for making a mess and eager to tell us stories about her day's adventures. It seemed inconceivable that she was gone. I loved her more than anyone in my life and by equal measure often sought to resist her powerful will, like a rock in a current, hard to steer around, and at the same time the source of endless joy and delight. We called her Mima, and just the name alone always evoked a sense of happiness. Many years later, I was thrilled to watch my son break into exuberant shouts of “Mima, Mima,” whenever she arrived at our house.

Christa would have been the first to say that she had lived a very full life. And yet, there were tremendous losses throughout. When Christa arrived in Bonn, the young capital of the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany, in 1950, she had left behind an entire world. The land of her birth and her childhood home had become a part of Poland. She had lived through the first years after the war under Soviet occupation in what was to become the new German Democratic Republic, also called East Germany. Her father, brother, first husband, and many friends had died in the war. Many of her relatives and friends were displaced from formerly German regions such as East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia.

Christa’s second husband, my father Wolf Ulrich von Hassell, had been gravely ill during the war, spending almost three years in a hospital. Many of his friends died in battle. His father died at the hands of the Nazis after the failed assassination attempt against Hitler known as the 20th of July plot. In the first decades after World War II, my father was treated by many Germans as the son of a traitor. Meanwhile, his sense of disconnect from postwar Germany was exacerbated by years spent abroad as a member of the diplomatic service.

My father’s career as a diplomat took them from Germany to Italy, Belgium, and eventually the United States. After living abroad for the better part of their marriage, they made America their home, where Christa managed to embark on a second career in the latter part of her life.

"What are we going to do with all this?" My brother’s face was smudged with dirt, sweat beaded on his forehead, and his hair looked in need of a trim.

"Did you know there was so much in here?"

Agostino shook his head helplessly. He had what I privately thought of as the "family mouth"—wide, with thin lips, with a vulnerability like that of a child, and yet with expressions that could range from skepticism and amused detachment to grim resolution.

His expression of raw bewilderment echoed my feelings.

"What are we going to do with all this?" my brother asked again, holding a stack of papers in his hands as if it were about to explode. In a curious way, he appeared to take delight in the sheer horror of it all, relishing every single item we dragged out into the open, admiring the untrammeled eccentricity. I understood the sentiment to a degree.

With a mix of chagrin and affection, my brothers and I had often laughed about my father’s saving empty aspirin bottles for recycled nails (you never know when you might need them again), his careful harboring of spare decorative metal studs for the wooden rim of a Spanish brasero, the little piles of unused stamps detached from letters and dried on the windowsill, and his insistence that new shoes had to be kept in the closet for years—because they were still too new to be worn. He was shocked when my mother wanted to toss out an old suit of his.

"Look." Christa held up the suit for my father’s reluctant inspection. "The fabric is so old that the lapels are shiny."

"But, Christa, it's a very good suit," he protested. "We bought it at a fine store in Rome." That suit was over thirty years old.

Now, Agostino and I contemplated the pile in front of us.

"I definitely want to take the barrel soap home with me," I said.

For an instant, my brother smiled, and we were united. Both of us remembered the big pot Christa used for boiling the linen dinner napkins until the water turned cloudy. She stirred the grey mess with a big wooden masher, soaked the napkins in barrel soap, and boiled them some more until they were pristinely white and free of all stains. In the summers, she laid sheets and napkins out on the lawn, rubbed barrel soap into the fabric, and watered them diligently over and over, until the sun had sucked out all the spots and stains. "I am turning the bushes into ghosts," she’d announce proudly when draping sheets and towels over the shrubbery.

 "I suppose we have to go through everything." Tentatively I pulled out a bundle of papers held together with crumbling sticky rubber bands from one of the boxes. "It’s letters." My father’s handwriting was unmistakable. "Letters to Christa."

Agostino wasn’t listening anymore. He was peering at the contents of a badly stained oversized German-style file folder. "Letters from the Red Cross," he said.

"What dates?"

"Nineteen forty-seven, nineteen forty-eight."

"Look at this," I exclaimed. We stared at bound notebooks and stacks of letters in an unfamiliar spiky script. "I wonder who wrote these."

My brother picked up one of the booklets. "This one has flowers glued into the pages and postcards. Signed by…," he peered at the handwriting. "Heinrich? Who in the world is Heinrich?"

I shook my head. "I can’t deal with this now. I have to go home." I closed up the box in front of me. "Toss the tomato cans before they explode."

"Do you think they were imported from Brussels?" Agostino asked with a smirk.

"Anything is possible." We lived in Brussels when we were children. Frugal and adverse to waste in any form, our parents never left anything behind on their various moves from Germany to Italy, Belgium, Germany again, and finally New York in the course of my father's career as a diplomat. "Why don’t you start sending me some of these boxes? I will go through them at home. Will you be okay?"

"There is so much here—even stuff from before the war." Agostino was still rifling through the contents of one of the boxes. He looked up, grinning at me. "Really, do you think Zickelbart is in there?"

"I wish you hadn’t suggested that." I shook my head, torn between laughter and tears.

On the way home, sitting on the bus in stop-and-go traffic on the Long Island Expressway, I thought about Zickelbart, one of our family ghosts.

Of course, Zickelbart did not properly belong in my childhood. He was a ghost from my mother's childhood in a place that belonged to the past in more ways than one. He figured prominently in Christa’s stories about Muttrin, the place in Pomerania where she spent much of her early years. After World War II, Muttrin became a part of Poland and is now called Motarzyno. It is located about an hour west of Gdansk close to the Baltic Sea.

Zickelbart means "Ragged Beard." Who was Zickelbart? Where did he come from? My mother had no idea. This disembodied spirit appeared on occasion in Christa’s childhood home, upsetting the balance of the house for days on end. The lack of details left me free to imagine him and to give him color and substance.

When I was a little girl, lying in bed at night and trying to keep nightmares at bay, I pictured Zickelbart sweeping through the house, his hands reaching out as if to plead and to repel, brushing the whitewashed walls with his fingertips. The pointy beard always appeared ragged and slightly tinged with green. The slippers were worn and floppy looking, too long as if running away from the bony feet, blue with cold, sticking out underneath grey-striped pajama legs that seemingly independently indicated the bowlegs of their inhabitant. I borrowed the silk pajamas from my father just as I imposed my father's skinny bowlegs on Zickelbart. His spread-out arms fluttered as he weaved through endless hallways, with staring eyes and mouth wide open, pleading without a sound, in the shadow kingdom of passed-on memories.

Zickelbart flitted in and out of Christa's stories often enough that it was as if I had known him all my life—baffling, inconsolable, and timeless, a melody haunting my dreams, as familiar as the warm earthen colors in the pattern of the Indian wall hanging in my mother’s bedroom, stitched by a girl until the day of her marriage and destined never to be completed. Kept alive by her vibrant images, the country of Christa’s childhood seemed suspended in space like the horses in Rilke's poem "The Carousel", hesitating for a long time before finally sinking away into the ground. And we had internalized it all; at times it was more real than our own lives.

Zickelbart remained a question mark as did so many other details in my mother’s stories. Yet we clung to them, charmed by her enthusiasm and her gift for storytelling as much as by the world she conjured in front of our eyes. I loved the glow in my mother’s eyes when she began to talk, altering her stories slightly at each retelling, never finishing anyone. The world conveyed by her words had acquired a life of its own in the memories of its survivors and our imagination—akin to a love that haunted us because it got stopped in its tracks and could never move forward, or the fragmented recollections of a childhood arrested at a critical age.

Sometimes my mother talked about writing it all down, but she never did. I am oddly glad that this is so. It leaves me free to play with her stories in my mind. It didn’t bother me in the least that the stories she told us were fragmented. Their fascination lay in their being partially hidden as well as part of a world that was gone. A complete story would have been stifling.

The images of a magical childhood home filled with endless charm were all the more irresistible in that they provided a respite from the vaguely referenced themes of an insidious growing fear in the 1930s, war, loss of home and land, destruction, death of loved ones, disappearance, imprisonment, execution, starvation, fear, and exhaustion, on both my mother’s and my father's sides of the family. It was akin to reading a book with disparate storylines on alternating pages, one with spectacular colorful illustrations and vivid details, the other filled with sparse commentary, references to experiences hard to put into words, and blank spaces. And yet, even as a child, while listening spellbound, there were times when I wanted to escape. The compelling force of these stories overwhelmed me and made everything in my own life appear insignificant. It was impossible to look away or fail to listen.

I should burn the contents of those boxes, I thought. I struggled with resentment against my mother. She had sat on all this for years. Who was Heinrich? She never told us about him. She left the letters for us to find. Wasn't it enough of a burden to know that almost every single object in my parents' house had a history and an emotional punch that could not be shaken off? I was torn between the overwhelming urge to shut the door in all of it, on the one hand, and the nagging desire to explore these worlds that were not my own and yet occupied so much of my thoughts, on the other.

The longer I thought about all this, the more I realized that I wanted to write down what I know about the arc of my mother's life—as a form of bearing witness and a way of offering the next generation a means of coming to terms with the weight of the past. I wanted to acknowledge the letters’ existence and their tenor and mood, weaving them into the known facts of Christa’s life during those years while adding my conjectures about her actions and choices. At the same time, I wanted to preserve the privacy of the writers of these letters. It proved to be a precarious balancing act between filling out Christa’s remarkable story and respecting her silence.

When thinking about Christa’s life from the 1930s through World War II, I found myself confronting contradictions and gaps wherever I looked. I had a few facts and a timeline of events, a few notes written by Christa while at university, a box full of letters, the majority of which were written by a man I never knew about, and her stories about her time in Prague, supplemented by a description of Christa in the memoirs of a friend. I was forced to piece together an image of her life from fragments she shared and the stories I have heard from others.

What struck me most of all was the fact that my mother, so compelling in telling stories of her life, became silent and non-communicative in important respects.

Christa’s silence, in part typical for her generation, was also intrinsic to her personality. Throughout her life, Christa was unwilling to talk about anything that she could not manage in her own mind. She was the master of suppression and denial—in particular in matters where she fought bitterly against her inability to control a situation. My brother Adrian’s nickname for her was "the queen of denial." Christa’s survival instincts drove her to engage in something called totschweigen; literally, this means "keeping silent about something until it is dead," more properly translated as "suppressing something." Another expression that applies is nicht wahrhaben wollen. Again, the translation "denying something" is a poor shadow of the word, more precisely rendered as "not wanting something to be true."

As an aside, I might point out that the German verb schweigen, here inadequately translated as "keeping silent," connotes silence as an act of doing rather than a state. The notion of silence as an active choice runs like a drumbeat through the lives of people of my mother’s generation, and it shaped her relationships with us as well as with others. We had a plethora of words and stories that disguised huge swathes of impenetrable silence.           

Christa’s life was not that different from that of many of her peers who came of age in the 1930s in Germany, lived through the war, and had to rebuild their existence in the subsequent decades. Christa was a product of her time and her upbringing, and her strategies to survive were mirrored by other women of her generation, in particular, those from a similar social class and cultural background.

The habit of silence on many issues, so deeply ingrained, is a common thread when looking at their life stories. I suspect that many were silent out of a reluctance to burden their children as much as out of an overwhelming sense of discomfort and unease in speaking about their roles as witnesses or even participants at a time when Nazi ideology permeated every level of existence, tightening its grip on every activity and imposing increasingly stringent controls over movement, writing, and actions. The silence lifted to some extent in the 1980s and subsequent decades, when more individuals began to write down what they remembered. These women lived through extraordinary times. Each of their stories deserves to be told.

Christa’s story is also a universal one in that it touches upon the challenges resulting from relations between one generation and the next and the complexities of interactions between parents and children. We are shaped by those who have preceded us, especially our parents. As children of parents, all imperfect in innumerable ways whether present or absent, we are left with burdens to carry and to negotiate these in our own lives until we learn that we are also, if not exclusively, the product of our own choices. This too is a story that must be told to provide tools for the next generation to look back, understand, and ultimately move beyond the lives that have gone before.

The process of untangling the threads of my mother's life was inextricably linked to the impact her life had on my brothers and me. Of course, I could speak only about my reactions and feelings, even if occasionally the temptation to speculate about my brothers’ was hard to resist.

Meanwhile, first and foremost, I wanted to weave as complete a picture as possible out of the fragments, real, perceived, or imagined, of Christa’s life story and to capture the essence of this unique, complex, irreplaceable individual.