And then you can finally let it go.
* * *We arrive in Berchtesgaden and take a shuttle van to the Hotel zum
Türken, which is now a museum as well as a hotel. I try to ignore the
ominous history of this place and li my face to the physical grandeur,
to the mountain peaks rising around us. e rocky, snowy range
reminds me of the Tatra Mountains where Béla and I ĕrst met when
he reluctantly chaperoned me to the TB hospital.
Inside the hotel, Béla and I have a good laugh when the concierge
addresses us as Dr. and Mrs. Eger.
“It’s Dr. and Mr. Eger,” Béla says.
e hotel is like a time machine, an anachronism. e rooms are
still appointed as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, with thick Persian
rugs and no telephones. Béla and I are assigned to the room that
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, slept in, with the
same bed, the same mirror and dresser and nightstand that once were
his. I stand in the doorway of the room, I feel my inner peace shatter.
What does it mean that I am standing here now? Béla runs his hand
over the dresser top, the bedspread, he goes to the window. Is history
grabbing his skull the way it is mine? I grab for the bedpost to keep
from falling to my knees. Béla turns back to me. He winks, he bursts
into song.
It’s ... springtime for Hitler, and Germany! he sings. It’s from Mel
Brooks’s The Producers Deutschland is happy and gay!
He does a tap-dance routine in front of the window, he holds a
pretend cane in his hands. We saw e Producers together when it
opened in 1968, the year before our divorce. I sat in a movie theater
with a hundred laughing people, Béla laughing loudest of all. I
couldn’t even crack a smile. Intellectually, I understood the purpose of
the satire. I knew that laughter can li, that it can carry us over and