I had found her diary, the pages of which I had not destroyed but kept, as proof of her guilt. She was a silly girl! All she could speak of was of my taking her away from the shop, of perhaps giving her a little house of her own. At first she was jolly but as the days went by her distress grew. One Sunday, for instance, I had promised to see her. She had phoned the Osteria, left a message with Werlin to say she was waiting to hear from me. I was not there, of course. I had gone to Feldafing, and when Hoffmann invited me to coffee and dinner I told him where to stuff it. The silly girl waited for me all through the night. The Hoffmanns had even given her a ticket for the Venetian Night that evening, but she didn’t go.
Her diary became increasingly confused. I am utterly miserable, she wrote, the little slut, as if she could know true misery! I had been on the Front. Eva threatened to buy more sleeping powders.
He only needs me for certain purposes, she wrote.
Later I invited her to dinner at the Four Seasons. At the end of it, I gave her an envelope with some money.
A few days later the stupid whore Frau Hoffmann told Eva I had found a replacement for her, called Valkyrie.
On 28th May she took thirty-five sleeping pills and tried to kill herself but she failed.
The stupid whore! She could not even kill herself successfully.
The whole thing was a pathetic ploy, a cry for my attention. Well, I suppose she did get it, after all. I have always had a soft spot for a plump bit of dumpling and no mistake.
* * *
In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming and tries to forget.
In memory there’s no escape.
He remembers them fleetingly, in jumbled fragments. Avrom’s dark curls gleaming in candlelight, Bina’s laughter as he made faces at her and she snorted like a certain treife animal; their smell when they were babies, in those sleepless days when he sat by his typewriter morning and night churning out tales of Yiddishe gangsters and chaste girls with a wild heart hidden within, of bloodied murders and anti-Semite conspiracies and of detectives who walked the cold streets in search of a justice they knew to be an illusion – in those early days when the babies cried and Fanya feeding and the shouts of merchants outside silenced by snow, and a fire burning, and his fingers on the warm hard keys, and the smell of milk, of babies, everywhere in the house, and in everything he touched, and in his clothes – those were the happiest days of his life, he realised, and you only learn that too late, when they are vanished like smoke.
Those are the moments he wishes to burn like the pages of a manuscript. To see them consumed by flame so he would never have to see them or remember them or how they were, their smell eradicated for ever. He resents Fanya when she appears to him, unexpectedly, in unguarded moments; he resents her for leaving him. He wants her gone from his mind the way she had left this world, so abruptly: one moment they were together a family, and the next the man severed them with his horsewhip, they to go one way and he the other. They to the ovens, he to the work units. And he didn’t know, they didn’t know, Fanya held Avrom and Bina’s hands and looked back at him as they parted, and her lips tried to form a smile. ‘You will see each other again, they are only going to the showers, to be washed,’ a soldier said, a voice lacking in emotion, and an old man masticating toothless gums said mournfully, ‘Auschwitz, Auschwitz, what is this Auschwitz?’
He is angry at them not for leaving him but for coming back. They come from a world that no longer exists and has no right to intrude upon his present. Auschwitz, Auschwitz: there is only Auschwitz.
‘Do you remember?’ is a sentence never spoken, it is verboten, a transgression against the now. There is only now, no past, no future, there is only Auschwitz, an island floating on the Polish ground. The dead rise in black ash into the sky, day and night the ovens burn, day and night the trains come laden. And Shomer’s mind retreats into itself, the way it had when he was still a man. For he had been a writer of shund, of pulp, for Haynt and other publishers. He had made his living with his hands, at his desk, writing lies for money.
He had had some success. He was read by yeshiva boys in secret, passing his books from hand to hand; by young Zionists filled with ideological fervour, who would have denied it stoutly were they challenged; by the rabbis who confiscated the books from their wards, by the women who picked them up for a few kopeks along with a bag of onions in the shop, by intellectuals who railed against this prostituting of literature, by wealthy merchants and farmers and cobblers and clockmakers, carpenters and engineers: they all knew the name Shomer, which means guardian, or watchman, and was his nom de plume, for it was not respectable for a man to be writing shund.
For it was hopeless. His life had been erased like his books, set alight, reduced to ash and scattered. It no longer existed. But then, all lives were ultimately extinguished, and in their passing nothing remained of the person who’d been – their dreams, their thoughts, who they loved, what they hated – from Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon and down the ages to Jews.
And yet Shomer lives still.
He’d met Fanya at an open-air showing of a film about Palestine and the work of the pioneers there. She wore white. He was in his best suit, he had only recently begun to write: stories about detectives and dames, with no redeeming literary value. He’d sported a thin moustache at the time (Fanya made him shave it off before the wedding). In the film, men and women no older than he were tilling stony fields and sleeping in tents and picking oranges. They looked like Biblical peasants reborn in distant Palestine; he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live in this way. But he only half-saw them, anyway. All he really saw was Fanya, more real than anything the screen had to offer, like a woman out of the pages of one of his stories.
Of course, in hindsight, he realised that she wasn’t. She was not cut out of cardboard like the dames in the stories. She had an internal life he would never see (and now never could), irrational likes and dislikes, moods he could not interpret, times she was happy for no reason he could tell and times she was sad and he could do nothing to change it. But she loved him, he loved her, and they were happy for a while. Even in the ghetto they could still make each other happy, even on the train here he was still telling her and the children stories.
Stories, stories, he is sick to death of stories!
Yet they are all he has.
Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 – contd.
I was in a foul mood when I left the Mosleys’ party. The taciturn driver waited outside. He hailed me but I refused his offer of a ride, foolishly perhaps. I walked away, though I walked with a slight limp from my old injury. The night was dark and quiet but I was not fooled, for it is in the night that one comes most alive. To know the light you must understand shadows. I walked through Belgravia though I had the feeling I was being watched, and often I turned abruptly but there was no one there. Nevertheless the feeling of being watched persisted.
In this manner – that is to say, furtively – I traversed the city in an easterly direction. My mind was busy like a rat’s.
Vicious, dirty creatures, rats. Julius Streicher’s genius with Der Stürmer was, firstly, the graphic caricatures he ran: the long-nosed rat-like Jew, always lusting after German maidenhood. It was a magazine appealing to the lowest common denominator, glorying in gruesome tales of sex crimes and murders, all naturally blamed on the Jews. He was rat-like himself, was Julius Streicher, vicious and dirty and oh so effective. His magazine was all but pornographic; it put the English Daily Mail to shame. I didn’t know why I was thinking about him again after all those years. The past was threatening to catch up with me.
My mind returned to the symbol carved on the dead woman’s chest. I had thought the swastika forgotten. A red star rose over Germany now. In my preoccupation, I was tired and footsore, and perhaps not as cautious as I should have been. I had failed to pick up the signs of danger.
The approach through Walker’s Court in Soho was quiet. Too quiet. I did not see the whores. Of the mu
rder scene there was no sign, but then again it was only the death of a whore, and the police had other matters to engage themselves with. My footsteps echoed lonely in the abandoned street. I took off my hat momentarily and passed my hand over my damp hair and replaced the hat over my head. I took out my keys and opened the door and went up to my room. It was dark but the stairs were familiar. I had traversed them up and down so often I sometimes thought that I knew them better than I knew myself. I opened the door to my office. I seldom bothered to lock it. I had nothing to steal. Nevertheless, I was sure I had locked it on my departure. I was too slow, too tired. I was not yet alarmed.
I stepped through and switched on the light and saw the damage.
The desk was lying with its legs in the air like a corpse, its drawers open, their contents tossed out at random. The painting was torn off the wall. The books were scattered across the floor like the pearls off a broken necklace. Someone had taken a shit on the floor and used Ernst Jünger’s Fire and Blood as toilet paper. The two visitor chairs were broken into pieces. For some reason my own chair was left standing, as though someone had calmly sat watching while the destruction was being wreaked. The phone was pulled off the wall and the typewriter lay on its back like a drunk.
I won’t mention what they did with the hat rack.
I heard footsteps behind me but by then, of course, it was too late. They must have waited in the next room, my room, waiting for me to return. I began to turn but all I could see were shadows and then something smacked into the side of my head, near breaking my jaw, and I fell, the pain searing through me hot and bright. I tried to crawl away and for a moment they let me, just watching. My face was against the floor and the smell of piss was overwhelming. They had urinated on my effects and I would have killed them if I could.
A voice said, ‘That’s enough. Pick him up, boychiks.’
I tried to get away from them but they reached for me, two big men, one on either side, and lifted me up, as easily as if I were a doll. I dangled uselessly between them. ‘Stay away from my daughter, you fucking anti-Semite.’
He wore an expensive black wool coat and a black fedora and his shoes were polished to within an inch of their lives. He had big hands and hairy knuckles and a single item of jewellery, a plain silver wedding ring. He was older than me and heavier and he was unshaved, not out of worry but because he didn’t give a damn.
‘Put him in the fucking chair.’
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’
They dropped me into my desk chair, not gently. My head was throbbing and blood was gushing from the wound they had inflicted on me. One of them held a blackjack and it was stained with my blood.
‘Who the fuck let you in?’ I gasped.
‘Watch your language. Moishe?’
The big brute on the left raised the blackjack and tapped me on the knee and I thought I would die from the pain.
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’
‘Ready to be civil, now, Mr Wolf?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘I don’t speak Yiddish.’
He sighed, now. ‘Moishe …’
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’
This time I thought I was ready for the pain but I wasn’t. He boxed me on the ear, nearly tearing it off. His hand came back covered in blood and he wiped it on my coat distastefully.
‘You’re Julius Rubinstein,’ I said. ‘The banker.’ I spoke with difficulty. My lips found it hard to form words and my tongue felt sluggish
‘I’ll say it again, shamus. Stay the fuck away from my daughter.’
‘Which … one?’
‘Dovele?’
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’ The brute on the right picked me up, one-handed. Then he tossed me against the wall. I fell down on the pile of books, my cheek coming to rest on the big brown heap of shit they’d left for me there. It stung my eye. ‘You … filthy animals,’ I said. It came out as a moan.
‘Pick him up.’
‘Sir, he’s got shit all over him.’
‘I said pick him up!’
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’
They picked me up, grimacing, and deposited me back in the chair. I tried to wipe the excrement off my face but only managed to smear it around.
Rubinstein paced before me, his hands behind his back, as though delivering a lesson of the Torah to an errant yeshiva boy.
‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘can be headstrong.’ He turned to me abruptly, studied me with his pale eyes, then continued pacing restlessly. ‘It is not easy having daughters. You never married, did you, Wolf?’
‘No.’
‘Wise, perhaps. You never had children?’
‘No.’
He sighed. It was a long-suffering sigh. ‘Daughters,’ he said. ‘They’ll break your heart and laugh as they do it. Boys I can understand, boys know where their duties lie. But God never saw fit to give me boys.’
I kept my mouth shut. I had nothing to gain by antagonising him further. ‘What did she want?’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘My daughter.’
‘Isabella.’
‘Don’t use her name, you piece of shit. You’re not worthy of speaking her name.’
‘She told me your other daughter went missing. She wanted me to find her.’
‘Judith?’
‘You have another one?’
‘Moishe, please!’
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’
This time he slammed my head into the wall. I think I blacked out. When I opened my eyes again he was still there, silhouetted against the open door. I blinked, tasted blood. ‘Don’t give me lip,’ Rubinstein said. It seemed redundant to reply so I didn’t.
‘Did she say why?’
‘She told me …’ I licked my lips. Moved my mouth but no sound came. ‘Dovele, give him a drink.’
‘Yes, Mr Rubinstein.’
Dovele pulled out a hip flask and unscrewed it and put it to my lips. He forced my head back and forced me to drink. The alcohol hit me like an uppercut from Max Schmeling.
‘Scheisse!’ I said, when I could speak again.
‘It’s the good stuff,’ Dovele said.
‘I don’t drink.’
‘You do now.’
‘Go to hell.’
Rubinstein smiled. ‘This is hell,’ he said. ‘But this is your hell, not mine.’
‘Where is your daughter?’ I said.
‘Which one?’
‘The one I was hired to find.’
‘That is not your concern. And Isabella should never have approached you. You will not see her again. I very much recommend that you don’t try to either.’
None of it made much sense to me but then at that point I could barely make sense of my own face if I had a mirror. ‘Did you pay to smuggle her out of Germany?’
‘That is not your business.’
And yet he did not cease pacing, nor did he stop answering my questions. If I had to venture a guess at that point, I may have said I was looking at a very worried man.
And worried men are often angry.
‘You don’t know where she is, do you,’ I said.
‘Listen to me, Wolf, or whatever you call yourself these days – do you think I don’t know you? You are nothing, you are less than nothing; you are the shit beneath my shoe.’
‘Göring,’ I said – throwing it out to him.
He stopped and stood stock-still. That was enough for me. ‘You paid him to get her out of Germany, didn’t you,’ I said. ‘But she never made it out the other end and now you’re panicking.’
For a moment he looked murderous, then abruptly he subsided and shrugged. ‘So you still have some contacts with your old comrades,’ he said. ‘You think they value you? One thing that can be said for Nazis, Wolf, they make shitty sentimentalists.’
‘One thing that can be said for Jews,’ I said, ‘is that … no, I’ve got nothing.’
Unexpectedly he laughed. ‘You used to have plenty to say.’
‘I can help you find her. If you
let me go.’
‘You?’ He gestured at the room, the broken furniture, my broken face. ‘You can’t even help yourself, you schmuck.’
I had a moment of clarity, then. Perhaps it was the whiskey. ‘You don’t think they did it, do you? You don’t think they did it because you work with them.’
Again he went still. This time, I had the feeling I was on thin ice. He was a man always in control, but it must have cost him, and inside he was coiled tight. The wrong pressure could set him off and then there’d be no telling what he’d do. ‘How can you, a Jew, work with—’
‘Nazis?’ He laughed. ‘Cock-sucking opportunists,’ he said. ‘That’s all they are. Rats growing fat having jumped a drowning ship.’
A Man Lies Dreaming Page 9