At the very moment when Joška Herzl had pulled a box of matches from his pocket, the train began to move, and not even he could juggle in a moving train.
“Fine, we’ll do it later,” he said, offering Rudi the box for safekeeping.
But there was no other opportunity, the compartment was soon crammed with passengers, all heading to Maribor, the train made no more stops, all the track signals were open.
Only after he had ceremoniously bid his fellow travelers goodbye, extending his hand and saying, “We shall meet again!” and after Rudi caught sight of Joška Herzl through the window as he disappeared down the platform in Graz, did Rudolf Stubler realize he had not seen him juggle the matches. He felt a deep sadness, stronger than expected, and considered getting off the train to urge Joška Herzl to come back and prove his talent. He called “Joška!” out the window, but by then Joška was far away and running, as if he had just seen someone he knew.
Here the story of Rudolf Stubler’s first postwar trip abroad might have ended. And he would have ended it, if that were possible. Unable to reach the match juggler, he should have just gone home. His trip had lost all meaning: the burners for steam locomotives that, in the name of the railway headquarters in Sarajevo, he was to order in Berlin were no longer being manufactured anyway. The factory had been leveled to the ground by Allied bombing raids, and he knew this before setting off on his trip, but he had kept it quiet at the Sarajevo headquarters and at the Unified Railway Ministry, while Wilhelm Furtwängler, the celebrated conductor on whose account he had undertaken this journey, all of a sudden no longer interested him.
The great German conductor whom Rudi worshipped, listening to his performances on crackling gramophone records, had saved the lives of a number of Jews who played in the Berlin Philharmonic. A bassoonist, an oboist, and even a flutist obtained the privileges of honorary Aryans thanks to the great conductor – Himmler was against this, perhaps Goebbels too, but music, in the end, took precedence over the desires of mere mortals. The great Germany could not allow Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung to sound imperfect. The perfection of Wagner’s music guaranteed the final victory of the German spirit, and it was not possible to attain that perfection, it seemed, without the Jewish bassoonists and oboists…And thus, they said, did Furtwängler save the lives of these Jews and redeem himself for participating in the cultural and musical life of Hitler’s nation. The iconic figure of the regime thereby transposed himself in 1945 into a righteous man.
Rudi, too, had read the story of the bassoonist, the oboist, and the flutist somewhere, and was prepared to repeat it word for word should anyone question the greatness of Wilhelm Furtwängler in his presence. If someone investigated, if in Berlin there were Yugoslav spies and someone denounced Comrade Rudolf Stubler in Sarajevo for having attended a concert by a confidant of the fascist regime, he would narrate for the police the moving story of the Jewish musicians. If that was not enough, let them put him on trial, let them send him to Goli Otok.
Rudi was the family coward, but not when it came to Furtwängler. He felt strongly that music was greater than anything, greater than any suffering, fear, or death, and that music would protect him from anyone who had any prejudice against Furtwängler’s wartime performances, or against anyone who might infer from Rudi’s German heritage a sympathy for the Nazis.
He had not cared about anything before his departure except getting through all the national borders and arriving in Berlin.
And then Joška Herzl, the match juggler, had ruined his plans.
He no longer felt like going to Berlin, to a Furtwängler concert.
So he was not disappointed when there was no concert.
He landed in a city that was raising itself, brick by brick, up from ruins. The streets of new Berlin, whose contours were barely reminiscent of the old city, droned with American and Russian trucks. The nighttime bars rang with Afro jazz music, and all the languages of the occupiers could be heard, while the border between the eastern and western zones was as yet invisible. Soon a wall would be built that would stand as a symbol of the divided world in which Rudi would live the rest of his life, and that world would seem to him as to everyone inalterable and eternal. For the seven days he spent in Berlin, he wandered aimlessly, irritated by the sights, smells, and sounds of the city sprouting up. Nothing there was his anymore, and with the Germans he encountered – at the kiosks, in shops, or at the reception desk of the modest Hotel Hans – he felt less connection than he had with the occupying soldiers and officers during the war in Sarajevo. Toward them he had felt defiance – combined with fear and a desire to avoid them – but they had nevertheless been people he could understand in some deep sense, as one understands the misfortunes and moral failures of others, but with these Germans, who were taken up with jazz and the Russian kazachok, Rudi found nothing in common. Hunched and sullen, as if the low northern sky lay heavy on the crowns of their heads, they looked as if some great injustice had been inflicted upon them.
This annoyed him, and at last, years after the death of the family patriarch Karlo Stubler, Rudolf Stuber stopped being a German. He simply no longer felt like one. In late summer 1954, in Berlin, something happened that changed him and solidified in him a different sense of identity, which, at least for the sake of the story, and to get to the point, could be called Croatian. Or perhaps Bosnian, or at best Ilidžan – a Catholic identity, narrow and quaint like San Marino, but still strong and secure enough to last for the rest of Rudi’s life.
Since becoming a young man, Rudi had been a little of this and a little of that. Whenever he was really afraid, during the war, in his imprisonment, or later, when they came for Opapa to lead him off to a camp, and later still, as that horrifying event had faded a bit from his memory and their stories, Rudi had felt like a German. When he played cards with the old Sarajevans – Franjo and Isak Sokolovski, along with one or another of his railway comrades – during the long spring and summer Saturdays, in the courtyard beneath the thick canopy in front of the house on Kasindol, people would pass by to say hello. In those moments, Rudi had felt a part of that world, and he’d been a Croat and an Ilidžan. And this was how Rudi’s national identity shifted with respect to social conditions, mood, and the time of year. But he felt like a German, usually, when he found himself in the minority, when he was afraid, or when he had read something in the papers about great German war crimes. He was a German when he came face to face with Auschwitz or Jasenovac – though other Germans had no connection to Jasenovac at all – but he would be a Croat when he said hello to the Ilidža villagers or when he took his sister’s children to Vrelo Bosne and then, while they went off down the long alley way, he sang softly the lyrics to the song “Jahorina”: Oh how high Jahorina, oh gray the falcon that cannot fly over it…
He had nothing in common with the Berliners, he did not recognize himself in their eyes but was seized by the urge to grab them by the collar, pull them aside, and tell them what the Germans did to him and his loved ones, how they dressed Mladen up in one of their uniforms, decorated it with the symbols of the SS, sent him into battle with the Partisans to die as he ran from one stack of hay to another. Haystacks protected us from your bullets, Rudi would have shouted at the first Berliner giving him that self-pitying and accusatory glance, but of course the Berliner would not have understood, no one there would have. They had no idea, for they wanted to forget as soon as possible. They would have only heard Rudi’s accent and in it identified his heritage. Oh, those Danube Swabians, they had entangled us in everything with their sick need to attach themselves to the homeland, to become part of a great German empire along with their Romanian and Bulgarian backwaters, a Third Reich, founded on optical illusions and magicians’ tricks that would enable those Transylvanian boondocks, the Volga, and Stalingrad, wherever any of those provincials might live, to become suburbs of Berlin! And then our sons – oh, our violated daughters; oh, our dead-and-gone sons – would
be fighting in Russia, going all the way to Yugoslavia and Greece, only to enable the ingrates to consider their mangy Heimat part of Germany. What an insane geopolitical strategy, what futile suffering, and all because the Führer had wanted to make those people’s thousand-year dream come true. Which wasn’t at all surprising since Hitler himself was an Austrian and he didn’t even have German citizenship, did he? And as an Austrian, he was sentimental about that mossy, dirty world, which had nothing German about it, except that they spoke their own corrupted form of the German language. We had once thought they might be Germans, but now we know they’re not. They deported them to us after the collapse in 1945 as additional punishment for what we did and didn’t do, as punishment for Adolf Hitler’s demented attachment to all those Slavs, Romanians, Bulgarians, to those Mongolians who wanted desperately to have their Mongolia belong to the Third Reich.
Rudi read their thoughts as he wandered around Berlin, stepping into stores for basic goods where everything was too expensive. He knew what any one of them would have thought had he grabbed him by the collar and shouted that Mladen hadn’t been an SS officer, a criminal, or even a German, he’d just known the language, or that those feeling sorry for themselves and blaming the whole world for their sins, had protected Mladen from the Partisans’ machine-gun fire with a haystack. That’s who these people were, Rudi thought, infuriated, they dressed a man in an SS uniform, raised him up to have Aryan honors, and protected him with haystacks!
Rudolf Stubler had completed the work regarding the burners for the narrow-gauge steam locomotive on the Sarajevo-Ploče line by the third day of his stay in Berlin. The factory razed to the ground in the bombing had been rebuilt and now produced oven burners for steam heating. It had the same name and symbol – the symbol contained a tiny steam engine – which probably confused the people at headquarters and the Ministry of Railroads, but they did not ask, nor did they know German well enough to ask whether the new factory would actually produce burners for steam locomotives.
After this, so as not to return to Sarajevo without having accomplished his task, he went to the German railroad headquarters, which was located in the Soviet zone, and there he quickly learned that they had an abundance of obsolete burners for steam engines that were kept at the railway yards in Charlottenburg, and that they would be happy to sell them to the Yugoslavs at a low price. He went to Charlottenburg and discovered that indeed they had enough burners for the next hundred years of traffic on the Sarajevo-Ploče line.
At first he wanted to go back to Sarajevo immediately, though he still had five days left before his agreed upon return date. He did not like Berlin. The city nauseated him – not just the people there, the Germans, or what the Germans had become, but also the repugnant manner in which Berlin was raising itself from the ruins. It repulsed him and also scared him. An enormous, gray cement colossus was rising from a dream, from the dead, reaching for the sky with senselessly tall towers amid the nothingness and the ruins; the hundred-meter-long apartment buildings with thousands of equally sized windows looked like prisons or barracks for a monstrously large army that would remain there forever. On one side of the invisible line, they were building according to American plans – the city looked like a stage replica of Chicago – and on the other, the Soviet architects seemed to be designing sets for a Nikolai Ostrovsky performance. Berlin looked like a scary splicing of America with Soviet communism. And it seemed as if at any moment a new, bigger war could break out. It was as if the Americans and the Soviets did not notice each other, passing one another blindly at the great intersections of the city. Only the Germans, the lumpen proletariat of the big city, provided an awareness and image of the two occupiers, making them visible through their accusatory glances.
Then Rudi decided to stay.
His hotel was paid for, he had the cash he had received from the Ministry of Railroads in Belgrade for his trip, along with fifty black-market American dollars that he intended to spend on a wristwatch and gifts for his family – and it occurred to him that he might never have another opportunity for five free, unencumbered days in Berlin. And who knew whether he would ever be able to travel to Berlin again…And so Rudi stayed.
And as he stayed, he thought of Wilhelm Furtwängler at the Berlin Philharmonic. The concert he had initially planned to attend was held on August 1, 1954. The program included the Pathétique Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven’s Ninth, and, as a symbolic climax, Chopin’s Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. There was no announcement in the newspapers, but it was understood that this concert was being given on the fifteenth anniversary of the war’s start, and that the Chopin finale was to serve as a quiet German apology for the attack on Poland in the early morning of August 1, 1939. Rudi had read about this in Belgrade’s Politika; he then heard about it on a nighttime Berlin radio station, which was when he decided to try and get to Berlin. Everything had gone smoothly – for months at the railway headquarters there had been a great concern over the steam burners, and no one found his offer to try and resolve the situation suspicious, for there were few at headquarters who knew German. And those who did know the language were in no hurry to reveal it.
When he showed up at the ticket office, they told him the concert had been canceled two months before. It had been canceled as quietly as it had been announced – the ticket clerk told Rudi. But why? he asked naïvely. The man just looked at him and said nothing. Perhaps he offered a feeble smile, thinking how stupid and naïve people could still be, or perhaps he thought that this tall man with the shaved head and rather odd accent was a spy who’d come to observe his conduct during the de-Nazification.
“Besides, the maestro is ill. He grew suddenly weak on his return from Lucerne, he conducted the London Philharmonic there, you know,” said the ticket clerk, deciding for some reason that it would be important to let the ignoramus know that Furtwängler had conducted British musicians in Lucerne.
“The maestro is getting on in years,” he answered, just to say something. “He’ll soon been seventy. But so will I…”
“A hard life.”
“We’ve all had a hard life, at least in the last twenty years. And before that…” he hesitated, as if trying to remember, “before that it was hard too. It has always been hard in Germany.”
“Where hasn’t it been?”
“That is well said. I’m sure it has been hard everywhere.”
“And the maestro, as you say, is getting older.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t just that. He declines from day to day, as if there’s something eating him from inside. All men have their problems, except that in some it develops and in others it doesn’t. With me for instance, I should introduce myself, my name is Alois” – he offered Rudi has hand through the hole in the ticket window – “inside me there surely exists an Anti-Alois. But I’m not complaining, I’m in good health, Anti-Alois is still insignificant in relation to Alois!”
He struck himself twice in the chest with his right hand, demonstrating how healthy he was. It echoed hollowly, as if somewhere deep in the woods an ax had hit an oak trunk.
“So you believe the problem is with the Anti-Furtwängler!” Rudi said, laughing.
“Exactly! And don’t laugh. I don’t think the maestro will be around for long.”
The old man announced the conductor’s imminent demise rather cheerfully.
“Forgive me for laughing.”
“And where are you from? You don’t sound like a Berliner.”
“I’m a Yugoslav.”
The ticket clerk was taken aback, but only briefly, and had an answer ready that was inoffensive enough for the conversation to continue without arousing suspicion from any spy – American, British, or Soviet.
“My deceased wife was born there, in Yugoslavia. Actually, the country was called by another name then: the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Something like that, no one remembers what its actual name was.
The Personal Union of Austria, Hungary, and some other lands, under the rule of the Habsburg royal family. It was all very complicated. That’s why it had to fall. People want simplicity.”
“And that leads them to war.”
“That could be, my dear sir, it very well could. But I wouldn’t know anything about that, I was freed from military service long before all these wars. You wouldn’t believe it, but I’m flat footed. Besides, I only have one lung. They sliced the other one out because of tuberculosis when I was seven. They thought I wouldn’t survive. And look, they were wrong, Alois overpowered Anti-Alois.”
Rudi sensed just then that someone was behind him. He turned around, thinking the man wanted to buy a ticket, and he gestured with his hand as one does when letting another onto a tram.
The man was of medium height, but one of those straight-backed old men who appeared much taller than they actually were. He had a thin moustache, like gun fighters in films about the Wild West, a prominent, quite recognizable head, and he patiently waited for his turn.
He smiled at Rudi, who stared at him, astonished, and Alois extended a small packet wrapped in brown paper to him through the opening in the window. “Here you are, maestro!” he said, proud that Rudi was seeing and hearing this.
The old man took the packet with his long, knobby fingers and bowed to the stranger.
“I thank you!” he said then turned back to Alois. “Mr. Stickelburger, please give my regards to Colonel Stewart. Tell him I will send him a letter shortly. He already knows everything else.”
From behind he looked much older. He moved slowly. His steps stayed close to the ground, his soles scraping the floor, as if suffering from Parkinson’s. A great deal of time had passed before he made it all the way to the exit.
The door scraped closed, the sound of the Berlin streets disappeared, the voices of people and the ambulance sirens, as if the space had been hermetically sealed.
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