Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  “Oh? Didn’t Charley tell you? I’ve quit smoking.”

  “Congratulations. How long has it been?”

  Josef looked at his wristwatch. “Exactly four hours and twenty minutes. I quit at nine o’clock this morning.”

  “Just about the time you wrote your resignation to Dr Jenkins?”

  He hesitated. “Just about.”

  “Dr Jenkins wants to see you.”

  “I have nothing more to say to him—or to Charley.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes and rested her forehead in her hand. Josef put on his suit jacket, stuffed his necktie in a pocket, and leaned over to pick up his brown leather briefcase.

  “I’ll be going.”

  She looked him directly in the eyes. “Carlos thinks you are suicidal.”

  Josef shrugged.

  Elizabeth scrutinized his face. “No. If you wanted to kill yourself, you wouldn’t have come to see me.”

  “Is that what you told Charley?”

  She did not answer.

  “Maybe I came to say good-bye.”

  “No, Seff. I don’t think so. I told Carlos that if you wanted to kill yourself you would not have written a letter of resignation. It’s a red flag.” She looked up at Josef; he stood near the examining table, poised for flight. “I understand it. You know I do. We’ve talked about it. The daughter of a Calvinist minister—I carry the guilt of the universe on my shoulders. I am responsible for every leaf that falls from every tree. My fault. Every morning I have to make the decision to live another day.”

  “That is why I knew you would understand.”

  “But you? You haven’t the right. You haven’t thought it through; you are in no condition to make such a decision.”

  “I have thought about it. For over twenty years I’ve been thinking about it.”

  She shook her head. “Looking at you, listening to you, my dearest friend, I would say that you are sliding into a serious depression.”

  “Most likely,” he said, “I am sliding out of one.”

  “And the worst thing you can do in your mental state is to quit working.”

  “I have quit.”

  “They are not accepting your resignation.”

  “My God!” It was a wail. “Having a medical degree is the wrath of God! They have no choice! I am not well! I am not fit! Understand me and do me the favor of telling that intrusive bastard when you talk to him at exactly two fifty this afternoon that I have quit! I am through!”

  She held her breath and waited.

  “I am not a good doctor, Lizzy.” He was begging now, imploring her. “I am not like you. I do not have the healing instinct. I never wanted to be a physician. I have always hated it. I do not like people.”

  “That is not true.” She stopped him. “You are like your mother. You are a warm and loving human being.”

  “I am an impotent bum. I am nothing. And don’t blame Tanya for my failure. I knew what she was when I married her. I never loved her.”

  “I don’t believe for a minute that you are impotent. She’s a cold fish and you know it. When is the last time you two made love?”

  “Elizabeth, she didn’t come down with me. Tanya is in Berlin.”

  “My God. You’re here alone?”

  He nodded.

  “How long?”

  “She left in the spring. May.”

  “You’ve been alone for six months?”

  “More or less. Five months.”

  “Have you had another woman?”

  He looked intently at her but said nothing. On trial for his life, he waited for her to continue.

  “You are a sexual man, Seff. You need a lover. I can tell by the way you look—even at me—that you are a sensual man.”

  “You are a beautiful woman, Lizzy.”

  “I am not! I never have been. And please stop calling me Lizzy.”

  “No, it’s true. I have always thought you beautiful. And so did my Uncle Philip.”

  “Philip,” she whispered. “You have a gift for stopping any real conversation. But I will not let you. Those years—the war years—you never talk about them, and you hide behind a wall so thick that even those of us who love you—dearly”—Elizabeth was trembling, near tears—“even we dare not ask. It must have been terrible for you. Horrible! You have got to come to terms—”

  “You miss the point completely.” Josef’s voice was cold and hard. “They were not horrible for me. It seems impossible for you Americans to believe that there were a few Jews and half-breed Jews surviving outside of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. Those last years of the war were—in a way—the best years of my life.”

  “That cannot be true!”

  “You see? You don’t know what you’re talking about. God!”

  “How can I know? You never talk about it. After the war my father and I sent request after request for information about Philip, about your family: to the Red Cross, to the Jewish Agency, to the American Christian Committee for Refugees, to the Army, Navy, and Marines. And finally, months and months later, my father received a letter from the First Airborne Division of the United States Army. I memorized it. You want to hear?”

  He nodded.

  Elizabeth closed her eyes and recited in a voice trembling with emotion:

  “Dear Reverend Duncan:

  “In answer to your inquiry regarding the whereabouts of your friends, we have compiled the following information:

  “We very much regret that as yet we have found no trace of the following: Anna Bernhardt née Jacoby, Philip Jacoby, Otto Jacoby, Greta Jacoby née Braunstein. These names will be broadcast over the widest possible network with the request that any person who has information will forward it to the Central Tracing Bureau.

  “Lothar Bernhardt, attorney, and son Josef Bernhardt have been discovered at the following address: Berlin-Gartenfeld, Kastanien Strasse 95.

  “They request that the following message be sent:

  “‘Dear Reverend Duncan. Many thanks for your inquiry. We were very glad about it. We survived all the hardships of war and we also hope to get through the winter. Our lodgings are nearly undamaged. Whether Anna, Philip, Otto, and Greta are living we do not know. We urgently hope to see you again. Kindest regards from Lothar and Josef.’”

  “Kindest regards!” she said tremulously, and then, again, “Kindest regards. I assumed you have been in—a camp. All I know is that somehow you survived.”

  “Somehow!” Josef snorted, his mouth twisted. “I was ‘arrested,’ you might say, toward the end of the war. But I was treated well. Before then, until the beginning of 1945, I was—quite comfortable.”

  “You weren’t in a concentration camp?”

  “Does that disappoint you? How on earth do you think I would have survived that? By skinning the bodies of my relatives for lampshades? By pulling out the gold teeth of the button lady, Frau Levy, and her grandson, Hans? That’s what the American consul in Berlin assumed when I applied for a visa after the war. I had a scholarship to M.I.T., Elizabeth, to study physics and mathematics, but they would not give me a visa because I survived the war. No, Eliza, I did not lift a finger to save myself—or anybody else. I was preserved for almost three years in a lunatic asylum run by the inmates, kept pickled in vodka thanks to the brains of the Gunther Rathkes who were unlucky enough to have crashed in their Luftwaffe airplanes.”

  “You talk in riddles! You let no one in! I don’t care if you were hidden in the Garden of Eden”—her voice was resonant, ringing—“it was horrible for you. Listen to yourself. You are angry. Angry and depressed. You have to come to terms with it. And then! Then you can kill yourself. But not now. You have no right!” The tears were gone, replaced by her anger. She tapped a cigarette out of the pack, struck a match so violently that it snapped in half, struck another to light her cigarette, leaned against the desk.

  Josef, standing now at the foot of the examining table, dropped his briefcase on the table and turned again to the olive-green blinds. But this
time he jerked the cord and rolled them up. The tiny room was ground level, and he faced—directly outside the window—a sturdy young maple, every leaf a vivid red.

  “Elizabeth, do you remember a poem—I think it was some kind of an elegy about the death of childhood?”

  “Can you give me more to go on?”

  Still facing the window, he said, “It was in the anthology of American poetry you sent me when I first came to McGill. I can’t remember the poet or the title, but it had some images of a day like this: white geese against green grass and blue sky, an apple orchard.”

  “‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,’” she said. “John Crowe Ransom.”

  He turned. “That’s it. I’ve been trying to remember it all day.”

  “It’s about a wonderfully naughty little child chasing after the geese in an apple orchard. It’s about her death—a letter of condolence.”

  Josef, excited at remembering, recited the first four lines:

  “There was such speed in her little body,

  And such lightness in her footfall,

  It is no wonder my brown study

  Astonishes us all.”

  He was unaware that he had switched to the first person in the third line. “But I can’t remember the rest,” he said.

  Elizabeth turned to him, her face and her voice tender. “You will, my dear, if you’ll give yourself time. Seff, is there any way I can convince you to see an analyst?”

  He shook his head vehemently. “You know I don’t believe in that.”

  “Remember what Santayana said? ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.’”

  ‘Remember what Shakespeare said? Those who summon up remembrance of things past ‘grieve at grievances foregone.’”

  “What happened,” she said, her voice tense, her words quick, “to your Uncle Philip? He wrote me that he had his visa in his hand and was on his way.”

  Josef, his face a storm, did not answer her.

  “His things came,” she said. “All his household goods, medical equipment—books.”

  “Elizabeth, I have to get to the bank before it closes.”

  “You at least owe it to me to tell me about Philip.”

  Josef’s lips were strained taut in a sardonic grin. “He went through a red light.”

  “There you go again. Riddles! How can you do this to me? You are not being fair.”

  His mouth still twisted in a grimaced grin but now trembling, he said, “You are the one who is angry.”

  “Angry is not the term for it: wrath—rage.” Her voice softened. “But not with you, my dear. Not with you.”

  “Elizabeth, he went through a red light!” Josef’s contorted smile came undone, and his eyes filled with tears. “It is not a riddle.” He was weeping now. “In 1938 one could take out household goods—including one car—but no money.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you remember that my father had two cars, a Duesenberg and a Willys Overland convertible?”

  “Yes, I do remember.”

  “Uncle Philip bought the Willys Overland from Father. All the papers came through. The day he was leaving. Uncle Philip, on the way to the ship to load the car—”

  “Oh, no,” she moaned.

  “He was so excited,”Josef sobbed, “he went through a red light.”

  “And that was that?”

  Josef nodded, wiped his eyes, took a deep, shaking breath. “Bad luck. They caught him; he was ‘taken into protective custody,’ as it was euphemistically phrased. And later . . .”

  “My God!” A whisper.

  “Yes, my God.”

  Josef, leaning against the table, and she against the desk, lost in their own thoughts, were silent for some moments. Then she looked hard at him as though gauging the strength of her next assault.

  “Did something happen today?” Her voice shook. “One makes mistakes . . .”

  “No . . . no.”

  “In surgery?”

  He brushed her words away. “It’s nothing like that,” he said. “Elizabeth, I’ve got to go.”

  “Carlos said you blew up at a resident.”

  Josef grimaced.

  “He said you over-reacted.”

  “Over-reacted! Good Lord!” Josef exploded, pounding his fist so hard on the desk that the ashtray jumped, dumping the butts all over. “My God, Elizabeth, I couldn’t have been down the hall for more than five minutes, and you two seem to have covered my entire history. What else did that shiny ape tell you?”

  “He told me—” She stopped.

  “Yes! Yes! Why stop now?”

  “He said that he never knew you were Jewish.”

  “You told him I was a Jew?”

  She nodded, her eyes wide. “He said he worked with you for five years at McGill—that he thought the two of you were quite close—and that he always assumed you were a German.”

  “A German!” Josef glared at her contemptuously.

  “I would never have said anything—but I assumed, being so close to you, that he knew.”

  “Knew what? That I am a Jew? Am I, Elizabeth? Am I not a German? After all, my father’s family are Prussians—Christians—from way back. And my mother’s lived on ‘German soil’ since the late fifteenth century—almost five hundred years. Doesn’t that make me a German? They were Spanish Jews, my mother’s family. They lived in Spain for centuries—that is, until Charley Borbon’s ancestors financed the Inquisition and they had to flee to Germany—1492, just about the time Christopher Columbus was discovering America, the land of the free. So you see, Elizabeth, maybe I’m really a Spaniard like Charley, who, by the way, was born in New York City and raised on a farm in Iowa, and who is discriminated against because some people here consider him a Hispano–American, not a nice thing to be in this country of liberty.

  “But I’m lucky; with my name and face, no one can tell what I am—that I’m really nothing at all, or, if anything, that I’m a cross-breed, a monstrosity halfway between man and ape.” Clutching the briefcase with the succinylocholine and Librium tightly under his arm, Josef opened the door of the examining room.

  “Josef.”

  He turned to her. “But Auguste LaRivière—that dear man—there is no hiding what he is.”

  “Who is Auguste LaRivière?”

  “A chemist who took his doctorate at the Sorbonne.”

  Josef stepped into the hall and slammed the door shut.

  “Josef,” he could hear her call as he hurried down the corridor. He had lost track of time. It was one forty-five and the banks closed at two. He mapped out the route in his mind: the little ravine, the overpass over Riverside Drive, the Iowa Avenue bridge over the river, up the steps of Old Capitol, and a cut through the Pentacrest. Twelve minutes, he estimated—if he ran—getting him to the bank three minutes before closing. Once he was inside, they would have to let him into his safety-deposit box. Elizabeth, he was certain, would not wait until two fifty en punto to telephone Carlos but would track him down at once, ruining, most likely, the rest of Carlos’s day.

  PART IV

  1944–1945

  Berlin

  CHAPTER SIX

  Liberation of Paris

  I, carrying the twenty baited bottles in the wire basket, and Tatiana, the map, set off through the park to capture the little Berlin wilds and to steal apples for the staff dinner the Chief proclaimed for that joyous night: August 25, 1944. Paris had been liberated the day before by the Americans.

  After all the bottles were placed, we hid behind the large shrub which concealed Mitzka’s secret passageway to the orchard, and I crawled through, ran to the trees, filled the wire basket with the green apples, made a bag of my white lab coat, tied it around my neck, stuffed it and my pockets and my shirtfront, then crawled back to her, on three paws, pushing the basket along, a most willing dog, holding the most beautiful apple, with a touch of red, in my other paw for her.

  “Ah!” Tatiana sniffed the apple. “It smells ju
st like apples.”

  We laughed.

  The celebration started after dark, at ten, in our Biology Lab, and was restricted to personnel from Genetics and Evolution, specials, and wives. The only exceptions were the Rare Earths Chemist, who worked for Mantle, and Marlene, who came with her husband, the Dutch Medical Student. Lab assistants were excluded. Sonja Press was there, of course, and Tatiana, who was special.

  Flasks of flowers from Gunther the gardener decorated the tables, and there were baskets of the polished green apples; bowls of sunflower seeds from the greenhouse in the park; and, from the garden adjoining the greenhouse, plates of radishes, carrots, and tomatoes and bowls of boiled potatoes and green beans. There were platters of baked rabbit, basins of polenta, flasks of molasses, pitchers of hot tea, and, of course, beakers and beakers of vodka.

  The tables were arranged in a square, with the seating as follows:

  I did not even try to sit next to Tatiana, because she had put a flask with autumn weeds—chrysanthemums and snapdragons—on the plate next to her, a signal that Mitzka would appear. The Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco had as usual shoved his way to her other side by putting a chair at the corner, infuriating that fat dumpling Bolotnikov, who had forgone more prestigious seating in order to be next to her. The French Physicist François Daniel, who was also quite interested in Tatiana, had some perverted Parisian idea that to win a beautiful woman one must pretend to be “disinterested,” so instead of jockeying to be near her, he sat beside Frau Doktor and acted charming.

  The dinner began as a jolly occasion. There were toasts to the Allies—especially to America—and many congratulations to François Daniel, who at one point gained everyone’s attention by shouting out. “We French were dealing the lethal blow!”

  “Tell me one thing the French did,” yelled Krupinsky. “One thing!”

  François Daniel stood. Head bowed, hand on heart, he said, “N’oubliez pas nos femmes.”

  “Translate, you crazy poilu,” hollered Krupinsky.

  “Don’t forget our women! They demoralized the entire German occupation army.”