The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  Stealing away, carving fragments of time out for himself, was something he hadn’t been able to do in months; his short presence in Berlin seemed even less promising in that regard, but here he was, nearly three hours richer than he had a right to expect. Unlikely as it was for any taxi to be on hand already, one happened to be stationed at the entrance of the hotel. In the cool, clear mid-July air, Bora directed the squirrel-faced cabbie to the quarter of Zehlendorf. Three turn-offs later, he realized that a dull grey car was following the taxi, with the “hotel detective” at the wheel. The licence plate was civilian, yet suddenly nothing could disabuse him of the idea that, by asking him the time, the General Staff officer had set him up or even pointed him out to a Gestapo plainclothesman. Damn it, he shook him off by calling attention to me.

  Everything about the lovely morning changed its colour, smell and taste. The squirrel-faced taxi driver, too, was aware that they were being tailed. “What street did you say again, Colonel?” was his tactful way of inviting his passenger to change destination, if necessary.

  Bora unhesitatingly repeated the approximate address he’d first given. “Leave me on Machnowstrasse.”

  BISMARCKSTRASSE, ZEHLENDORF

  When Bora got out of the taxi and entered a stationer’s on the busy Machnowstrasse, the grey car drove on. He whiled away close to fifteen minutes before leaving the shop and continuing on foot towards nearby Bismarckstrasse.

  A bomb – or fragments of one – had randomly struck his relatives’ charming house along the tree-lined thoroughfare. Half the roof had fallen in, leaving the walls intact; it was partly inhabitable, and you could enter it from the street. Inside, collapsed beams from the upper floors studded the once elegant entrance hall and stairwell. Whatever the enemy had dropped from the air had burrowed a large hole in the tiled floor, smashing through pipes and sandy soil; you could hear water running at the dark bottom of it.

  Through the years, Bora had seldom frequented this family’s pied-à-terre – not large but beautifully appointed, on two floors, plus a garage below and an attic. The attic was precisely what now occupied most of the stairwell. He had to keep close to the wall as he climbed to the first landing, where a door led to an apparently untouched apartment. Wreckage obstructed the flight to the second floor.

  Squeezing past metal shafts and rubble, Bora worked his way to his grandfather’s front door, blown open by the explosion. Things intact and things crumbled to dust stared back at him from the interior, where part of the ceiling had caved in. The internal staircase was leaning, tangled, off to one side, isolating the upper rooms. All that could be removed from the spaces readily accessible had been stolen. Skirting a large roof beam and a heap of roof tiles, Bora reached the library and peered in. The sombre curtain shading half of the shattered windowpane suggested that his relatives must have visited at least once after the air raids started. In fact, the destruction was so recent that there was no appreciable rain damage, and birds had had no time to come and build their nests and soil the floor. Bora scrabbled through debris to get in.

  In bookcases nailed to the walls, some of the books were still in their place; piles of them lay on the floor. The sight of an old armchair was like a friendly face in the midst of ruin. After Bora had wiped dust and plaster from it, he saw that it had not otherwise suffered. It was Grandfather Franz-August’s “fauteuil”, the same he’d had in his student room at the ancient family seat in Borna half a century earlier. There was nothing special about it, except that the old man was fond of it. English-made, it had originally been covered in leather, but at some point he’d had it reupholstered in damask. The structure below remained intact, so that one could feel the leather buttons through the cloth of the backrest with one’s fingers. Heavy and cumbersome as it was, not even scavengers could haul it out.

  Bora, who had a bittersweet recollection of his own regarding the armchair, ran his eyes around the room. If he recalled correctly, it was shortly after the great 1933 book-burning that Grandfather had this furniture moved to Berlin. He felt an ache just short of nostalgia, just short of fear. Everything seemed to be breaking apart. Buildings, relationships, people. It mostly happened from fatigue, although the worst – he was convinced – was yet to come. Wounds, illnesses, family crises were not ends in themselves; they were symptoms of a larger malaise, recognizable by those, like his stepfather and grandfather, who lived through the Great War.

  Whom will we blame this time? How many times can the same nation claim that it had been stabbed in the back? We reap what we sow. The most disturbing thought was that all would have to pay, the innocent along with the guilty. There might be no lands to the west left to escape to, and those in the Baltic may never be able to escape. Fear of the Russians drives them, and they don’t even know how much more afraid they should be. Those of us who served there know. Those of us who tried to stem the violence, who disobeyed orders and even flatly refused to carry out unspeakable crimes, know. Bora stroked the armchair as he would a beloved animal. He did not want to dwell on the panicked thousands who were huddling or running around in circles to escape East Prussia, the Sudetes, and the Banat. We at the front are fortunate that we can keep busy without agonizing about tomorrow. For us, as the Gospel of Mark says, Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Bora found feeling powerless particularly insufferable, so he forced his mind away from such thoughts. The prospect of returning to war in the mountains was attractive, to the extent that it left him no time to envision the future. Ignored thus far by looters, on and off the shelves were books on travel and the natural sciences, read by his father as a young man. Leafing through a nineteenth-century text by a Jewish astronomer, his glance fell on the name Friedrich Bora, written across the end page in a boyish hand, as youngsters do when they practise an elegant, “grown-up” hand. His father was obviously trying to impress a certain character on the letters, especially the flourish of the F, and the way the final A turned on itself like a snake or a tendril and swept back in a loop to meet the staff of the capital B. It didn’t appreciably differ from the Maestro’s autograph, such as Bora had seen on musical scores and portraits.

  Where the chapter “Comets” began, a folded piece of paper marked the page. It was blank, which disappointed him (Bora always looked for messages or signs), but graced by the watermark of a long-tailed star. Is this why it’s been placed there, or did Father simply stop reading at this point?

  Behind a door at the bottom of a corner bookcase, yearbooks, annual reports and catalogues chronicled the last ten years of the Bora Verlag. Behind these, looking for nothing in particular, Bora spied a set of shabby-looking volumes, so unlike the rest of the collection as to make him wonder, but not for long: by their suspiciously singed edges, he knew what they were even before he opened one, and then another. Heine, Proust, Gorky, a copy of The Magic Mountain clumsily covered in the jacket of a different book, a brochure from the Buddhist Centre in Berlin, which his Scottish grandmother had helped to create decades ago …

  He gloomily crouched in front of the bookcase. In Krakow, five years earlier, he’d sat in a Jew’s requisitioned flat, reading. He forgot the name of the man, a playwright, but remembered that room vividly, even the scent exhaled by the oiled furniture. Who could foresee that today, in a library strangely like that other one, and just as forlorn, he’d find similarly outlawed books?

  He would have stayed away, had he known about them. Now the titles his grandfather had saved from the Nazi bonfire changed this simple visit into something potentially incriminating for them all, when they least needed it.

  Jesus, what am I doing? What are we all doing? I should have never entered the apartment.

  He rose to his feet with the astronomy book in his hand. Through the window, visible past the ragged blackout curtain, he saw the grey car turning into the boulevard at walking pace, as if looking for someone. Why? There was nothing here for the authorities, unless they knew about the proscribed books … or him. His famous father’s name, so un
like his own bold and unadorned signature, stared back at him from the old page.

  I, who come after my elders and, compared to them, signify very little, have long ago signed my death warrant, he thought with a surprising lack of concern. The car crept to a complete stop in the abundant shade of an elm across the street. Bora watched it from the blighted room and his unconcern gave way to anger. He was angry with those spying on him, but – unexpectedly – also with his imprudent grandfather, with the officer who approached him at the Adlon, and those who – if Salomon wasn’t lying – might be maladroitly conspiring to end what they had helped to create. Could soldiers who allowed looting, political murder and deportation be credible?

  Most of all, he dreaded the idea that Salomon might be telling the truth. It tasted like blood in his mouth. If it’s true, and if they should fail, there will be mayhem of the kind we helped unleash in Stalin’s Russia, when we fed his paranoia about the Red Army and precipitated the Great Purge. Trials and bloodshed which the Weimar Prophet never predicted in his “visions”.

  … Or had he? Bora stepped back from the window. What if the officers who spoke freely before Salomon had secretly consulted Niemeyer? Why had he not thought of it? Seeking oracles was not beyond desperate men. At the time of the Reichstag fire the clairvoyant Hanussen was consorting with the powerful, knew too much, talked too much, and died. Bora held his breath.

  He had things to do (the Japanese chusa was right), and not much time. Before leaving the apartment, he pocketed a few papers from his grandfather’s study. He then gathered up the armful of forbidden books, carried them through the rubble down three flights of stairs, and dropped them down the deep hole in the entrance hall.

  When he came out of the building, the car was no longer stationed under the elm. In the tram on the way back, no one seemed to be following him, unless that dark green saloon with three hatless men inside had taken the place of the grey one.

  At eight o’clock he tried to phone Olbertz, not from the Adlon but from a booth at a discreet distance from the hotel. He failed to reach him. Either the physician was still out of the office, or else chose not to answer. The rest of his phone contacts – journalists who had interviewed Niemeyer and followed his career through the years – he would call up from the Adlon. He headed back there while the city started its wartime working day in earnest.

  Aside from the Jews among them – who had long since disappeared from the Berlin phone book, if not altogether – six out of the seven magazine contributors on Bora’s list weren’t able to satisfy his curiosity. He heard that two had since died; one was serving at the front; three were decrepit, had no memory of those days, and did not understand who was calling, or why.

  Only Max Kolowrat, left as a last resort, answered promptly, as if he’d been sitting by the telephone waiting for someone to ring him up.

  Bora immediately liked the cheer in his voice. And he immediately fought hard not to sound embarrassed while he identified himself and his reason for calling. Even if there was a remote possibility that Roland Glantz had not shot Niemeyer with his Drilling rifle, it was but a thin excuse for a phone call – given that he was Nina’s son.

  Kolowrat, however, did not sound overly surprised. “The Berlin Illustrirte articles,” he said, “of course, Lieutenant Colonel. I keep the entire series here at home. I frequented the so-called Weimar Prophet for a time … For professional reasons, during the decaying Babylon that was our Republic.” He laughed, and his laugh was also pleasant. He waited for Bora to say something, but Bora – who seldom felt awkward – was feeling very much like a tongue-tied boy. He hadn’t said why he was interested in the articles, or in Walter Niemeyer, as it was best not to give details over the phone.

  He regained his aplomb, as if he’d slapped himself awake. “Mine are professional reasons as well. I would be grateful to read through the material as soon as possible, sir.”

  It was Kolowrat’s Austrian lilt, barely there, like a repressed form of mirth, which gave his voice an amused inflection. “You are welcome to view them all; I’m not sentimental about those titbits of ‘asphalt literature’, as I believe such urban tales from the Weimar days are dubbed.” Bora had the distinct impression of a smiling man at the other end of the line. “Besides, there is much from my interview with the Prophet that I left unwritten, but I recall it perfectly to this day.” A pause followed, during which both men strove to conceal that they knew what this call was really about. Did Kolowrat conclude that Bora’s pretext for approaching him was not groundless? “Let’s see,” he continued, “I’m an early riser, and my days are free at this time. Shall we meet, so that I can give you the material?”

  It was what Bora had hoped (and in a small way feared) to hear. “Yes, please. The directory lists Drakenstrasse in the diplomatic quarter as your residence. Will I find you there?”

  “No, thanks to the British air force I have become a West Ender of sorts.” Kolowrat gave a Barbarossaplatz address in the so-called Bavarian quarter. “I will be out this morning, but home by the late afternoon.”

  Bora was sure he could shake Grimm off by 7 p.m., and suggested a meeting half an hour after that time. He hung up, unsure that he’d done the right thing, feeling guilty for mixing the requirements of his investigation with something else that was difficult to define, because it had to do with Nina. It was not curiosity on his part, much less a desire to check on his own mother – but it was, undeniably, the firm intention of letting Kolowrat know that she was not defenceless.

  8:58 A.M.

  The hotel staff would never disclose information about guests, save perhaps to the Gestapo. However, personal maids, helps and retainers did not qualify as guests. When Bora asked about the man he’d seen in reception and then in the grey car, the head concierge’s young understudy replied that he served as a chauffeur to a retired army general. Neither the general’s name nor other details were forthcoming.

  Bora had jotted down the grey car’s licence plate while riding to his grandfather’s; as a last resort, he was prepared to ask Grimm about it. For the moment, he said he would like an opportunity to meet the retired general.

  “Sorry, sir. His chauffeur picked him up at 8:15, and he’s gone.”

  “For the day?”

  “The general left the hotel, sir.”

  “I see. What about Colonel von Salomon, then? We were to meet this morning,” Bora lied.

  “The colonel too left the Adlon.”

  This could be good or bad news, depending. It relieved Bora of his pestering presence, but potentially let a disturbed man loose in a city where his penchant for confession could result in a disaster. “Well,” he said, rather more irritably, “where has he gone, then?”

  “He left no forwarding address, Lieutenant Colonel von Bora.”

  If Bora was in a contrary mood, Grimm mirrored his feelings. He arrived ten minutes after nine in a brash green tie with red zigzags, frustrated because there were no identifiable fingerprints on the Drilling other than the slight smears caused by Bora’s touch.

  “Nothing of use, then?”

  “No. The fact remains that Glantz had an air-force Drilling in the first place. Last Friday, two days after Niemeyer’s death, he sent it to himself to Anhalt station, poste restante, and, what’s most suspicious, he wiped it clean. There’s a nine in ten chance we have the rifle that killed Niemeyer.”

  “Was the man taken to headquarters?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Grimm hunched his fat shoulders. “He failed to return home last night. His wife is in a state. ‘Where is Roland Glantz?’ I pressured her. Nothing. ‘Where is Roland Glantz?’ Nothing. She weeps, and – nothing. I’m heading to his publishing house now.”

  OFFICES OF THE STERNUHR

  VERLAG, MITTE, 9:38 A.M.

  Roland Glantz was in the process of committing suicide in his office. This was the message Bora and Grimm received when they climbed the stairs of the tall, narrow building that hou
sed – or had housed – the office of the Sternuhr Verlag. Probably none of the people who packed the stairwell actually worked for the publisher. Some may not even have been residents here. But the daily tension, air raids and the tiresome overcrowded conditions could make the sight of one so cracked as to take his own life rather entertaining. Bora’s dislike for unruly crowds induced him, anxious though he was to get there in time, to let Florian Grimm overtake him. Using his elbows to shove people downstairs, the policeman pushed on like a salmon battling obstacles and gravity to swim upstream. Bora had to step aside and hold on to the balustrade so as not to be knocked off his feet by this or that tumbling body. In the confusion, he could not help thinking about his uncle, who – if Dr Olbertz had told the truth – had quietly done away with himself in the loneliness of his suburban home. Uncle Alfred had always been like that, a man of sound principles who did what he believed he ought to do, without fanfare. While Grimm single-handedly dispersed the mob on the landing above, Bora acknowledged that only a serious threat to his family or patients could have bent his uncle’s will. That’s how we are, in our family: they have to kill us before we change our minds. Once they kill us, we can continue believing in what we believe. Even if he could find the time to visit his cousin Saskia at the hospital while he was in Berlin, it was best not to do so; showing up at the clinic where she was hiding could make things worse for her.

  These considerations distracted him for the short time it took Grimm to clear the way. Suddenly the landing was deserted, and the two of them stood before a tall doorway of bird’s-eye maple, bearing a brass plaque with the name and logo of the publishing house: a twelve-pointed star set within a clock face.