by Steven Uhly
The corner house bore the number 2, the three men made for the entrance, a wide archway. Behind this a sort of arcade ran along the façade, connecting the house with the neighboring building. Large display windows lay in darkness, it was impossible to see what might be behind them.
They walked straight ahead up to a tall double door, a yellowish light shone through its frosted windows and the grilles on the front. Ephraim Frank pressed one of the bells, it was a while before they heard footsteps in the stairwell. Someone was coming. The stairs creaked and squeaked. Behind the frosted glass loomed a short, slight figure. The door opened and in the crack a very round face appeared, narrow eyes bordered by nickel spectacles. The man was wearing a gray suit, a tie and shoes with spats. He looked a little like an actor from the 1920s, Peretz thought.
Ephraim Frank nodded at the man, who then opened the heavy door fully and moved to one side to let them in. Stepping into the hallway without saying a word, they followed the man up the stairs.
On the third floor of the house a white-paneled door stood open. They entered a wide apartment hallway and, shortly afterward, a large sitting room, in the corner of which hung a heavy chandelier. The walls were covered in dark-red fabric, in the middle of the room was a long oak table, at which at least fifteen men were sitting on high-backed chairs. They turned to the new arrivals. So this was the meeting to which Peretz had been invited. Here was where the flight of European Jewry was to be restructured, the envoys from Palestine, men such as Ephraim Frank, had come to take the matter in hand.
And it was here that Peretz finally managed to banish from his mind the woman who had insinuated her way into his life, and exist as a single Peretz, for here he was amongst his peers. It did him good to talk about U.S. Army lorries, it did him good to think about how he could copy the model that the short man had devised for Munich. His name was Sally Zeve, and from his accent Peretz could tell that, like Abba Kovner, he came from Lithuania. Maybe he had been even sent by Abba.
No contact with the Bricha structure, Sally Zeve said in his high voice, Completely independent modus operandi, he said, My contacts with the Americans and my new business partners’ contacts with the Bavarian government mean that we can become middlemen, and perhaps even set up a monopoly. In this way, he said, all the lorries will pass through our hands and we’ll have enough for the transports. Who are your business partners? someone asked. Are they goyim? asked another. Sally Zeve smiled. He said, Even better. He glanced at Ephraim Frank, who nodded back, and continued, “They’re two Germans who got their hands dirty.”
“Nazis?”
“One’s a local car dealer who had almost a hundred forced laborers by the end of the war. The other’s a banker with a party badge, who has to stay out of the spotlight.”
There followed a silence, in the middle of which stood Sally Zeve, seemingly at ease.
“What good’s that going to do?”
Sally Zeve’s smile broadened, as if he had been waiting for this very question.
“A Jew, survivor of the Nazi concentration camps,” he said, pointing at himself with all his fingers, “and two fellow travelers—that’s the best combination imaginable for our purpose. The Jew,” he said, pointing at himself again, “has contacts to the Americans and is beyond all suspicion.” He looked around in triumph before continuing: “The Nazis have got their old contacts. They’re respected here. And they’ve got money that they’re very keen to invest in this business. Besides,” he said, raising his voice now, as if coming to a climax, “this way I’ve got them eating out of my hand without them knowing. If they see through me, I’ll point a gun at their heads: cooperation or incarceration.” His smile vanished. “The two men have faced this choice before, and we know the decision they made.” He paused for effect, grabbed the lapels of his jacket with both hands, gave each agent in turn a bold stare, rocked from the heels to the toes of his shoes and back again, and said, “Well?”
The assembled company conceded defeat. It was decided that a limited liability company would be established under German law. It would bear the following name: the Bavarian Truck Company.
“This,” Ephraim Frank said to conclude the item, “is the last time you will ever see Sally Zeve. In the future only I will be in contact with him. Sally has already rented a small plot of land on the grounds of the Alte Pinakothek here in Munich, where he’s going to build a cabin with a workshop and offices.” He stood, the two of them shook hands, the short man picked up a white hat, a long beige coat and a walking stick of dark wood and left the room, the apartment, the building.
When he had gone and Ephraim Frank had moved on to the next item, Peretz thought, I’m never going to find a person like that. For the first time he realized that for some missions you needed chancers.
When Peretz boarded the interzonal train the following morning he was so tired that he fell asleep instantly and did not wake again until they were heading for Berlin through the Soviet zone. The meeting had lasted all night. Important figures had spoken: Ephraim Dekel, who had taken command of Bricha throughout Europe from Prague; Asher Ben Nathan, who had come to Vienna with Ephraim Frank, and from there was now organizing the emigration; a Lithuanian; one of Abba Kovner’s men; and others, some of whom Peretz knew already, the rest were unfamiliar. The men had tried to put together an overview, they had exchanged information and rumors, talked about routes, control points, unguarded borders, and then over and over again about lorries, ships, billets, false papers, visas. Ephraim Frank would have to coordinate more than five hundred colleagues in Germany and now Peretz was one of them.
24
“Perhaps the moment when the life or death decision is made is not merely like a bullet hitting its target, someone falling to the ground, never getting up again, being buried and the war carrying on.
“What if nobody was present when the life or death decision was made? What if somebody was shot and fell, but nobody was there to witness it? Then the decision is postponed until somebody finds out.
“And if years pass before that happens, the life or death decision changes. It becomes like a door you stand outside, it could happen any time, the door could open at any moment, you settle down in a town, you get an apartment, you go shopping, you go to bed, everything at the threshold of this door.
“And if, many years later, the door opens and three people can suddenly look into the room beyond, how do you describe this feeling?”
One day, on October 7, 1980, a few weeks before her thirty-sixth birthday, Lisa would write these thoughts in her diary as she recalled the weeks leading up to her eleventh birthday. She would sit at the window of her small, thirty-fifth-floor apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, looking out over the island to the two bridges, and wonder at the course her own life had taken. How on earth did I get here? she would ask herself, allowing her gaze to roam across the landscape of houses, in which no one building was identical to another, and yet all served the same purpose: to pile people and their things on top of each other. For the hundredth time she would marvel at the bizarre beauty this gave rise to, and compare it to the bizarre beauty of her own life. Wherever there’s a lack of space, she would think, people want to go up and up. A skyscraper is a mountain, a volcano, geyser, tree, person. Below its cramped and dark, pressure from all sides, the only thing people want to do is stand firm and yet they escape, away and away until they’re right at the top, believing perhaps that they’ve won, even though all they’ve done is made room. Then she would pick up a pen and write about how it was when she began to grow up.
It started one afternoon after school when she went to see Herr Weiss for something to eat, to do her homework and have a chat, and he confided in her that from tomorrow he would no longer be a bricklayer.
“But what are you going to do, then?” Lisa asked in astonishment, taking a spoonful of her chicken soup.
Herr Weiss rocked his head from side to side, then folded his hands and placed them on the table in front of
him. He was sitting directly opposite Lisa and exuded great solemnity. Clearing his throat he said, “Well, you know, I’ve taught myself some mathematics in the last few months and now I’m doing the statics for a few architects. They haven’t got a clue about it, you see.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, grinned mischievously and shrugged.
Lisa took more spoonfuls of her soup while she thought about this. Herr Weiss caught himself waiting eagerly for her reaction.
“What’s statics?” she said after a while.
Raising his eyebrows and pointing an index finger straight up in the air, Herr Weiss said, “Aha!” He muttered to himself, stood and fetched a piece of paper and a pen, for he was about to explain to Lisa precisely what it was.
“Put in very general terms, statics is what stops a house from collapsing,” he said, already embarking on drawings and length specifications, for of course he would teach Lisa statics if she was interested.
But Lisa was not interested. She quickly grabbed his hand to stop him drawing and said, “Does that mean you’ll be earning more money now? Because you just built walls before. And walls are different from math. Walls can collapse, math can’t. Am I right?”
Herr Weiss let out a hearty laugh and said, Yes, yes, ha, ha, exactly, exactly. Then he said, “Well, I will be earning a little more money. Even more than a little more, to be precise.” He rocked his head from side to side, and now it became clear to Lisa why there was noticeably more chicken in today’s chicken soup.
That was in the spring. In late summer Herr Weiss bought himself a Philips black-and-white television set for more than one thousand marks, as he secretly admitted to Lisa, not without putting his index finger to his lips and saying, Shhh! She and all the other children in the street were there when a small lorry came wheezing down the road, stopped outside their building, and two young men jumped out to open the tailboard. Climbing into the back, they brought out a sort of enormous cube, which they proceeded to heave up to the fourth floor, sweating and cursing all the way. From that day on, residents of number 26, in a variety of combinations, would gather each evening in Herr Weiss’s small sitting room, now a touch more cramped with its glass screen that shimmered greyish-blue, to watch the news with tea and cakes. Frau Kramer and Lisa were always there, sometimes the Webers from the second floor would come, sometimes the widow Schmal with her twelve-year-old son Benjamin from the third floor, and only rarely the caretaker Meier from the ground floor with his family: Frau Meier, eight-year-old Grete and ten-year-old Wolfgang, who was in Lisa’s class at school. Occasionally even people from the neighboring house turned up, and Herr Weiss let them all in to watch, for he loved being the center of attention without having to do anything but turn the knob on his television set until the glass screen flickered into life with a short, high-pitched whistle and an image appeared.
All of a sudden they were connected to the whole country. The daily news, which was still a little like the old weekly newsreel, with plenty of music and uplifting reports, showed them blooming landscapes. Germany became a sovereign state, Germany obtained an army again, Germany manufactured the millionth Volkswagen Beetle, the German lottery was founded, the federal chancellor flew to Moscow for talks as an equal partner.
Everything in shades of gray.
Until one evening in September when the news showed a smiling Russian signing a piece of paper before standing and leaning diagonally across a long, wide table, on which were many more sheets of paper and coffee cups, and at which twenty or more men sat in gray or black suits. The Russian stretched out his hand almost toward where Herr Weiss, the Webers and Lisa and her grandmother were sitting, and an old man standing diagonally opposite on the other side of the table, and who could only be seen from behind, did the same: he stretched out his arm away from the viewers, into the depths of the meeting room, where the Russian’s hand was waiting for it.
At the very moment when their two hands met and grasped each other, at the very moment when the Russian moved his lips, the voice of the invisible news announcer said, “The prisoners are coming home!”
Frau Kramer’s eyes began to weep before she understood what these words meant, while Herr Weiss and the Webers, who usually passed comment on everything, making it impossible to hear the television unless the volume was turned up high, fell silent. The triumphant news jingle resounded and Herr Weber switched off the set. Lisa stared spellbound at the bright dot as it retreated to the center of the screen, becoming ever smaller until it vanished altogether. But as she watched, her head was getting to work. She understood what had happened, but she did not know what it had to do with her. She felt like a witness to an extraordinary spectacle, she experienced her grandmother’s emotions as if they were her own. But they were not her own, at that moment she became very aware that there was a gap she could not breach, and she was full of regret at having no memory of her grandfather, for she wished to be just as excited by the prospect of his return.
A week later Herr Weiss brought back some strips of wood, brushes and black paint from a construction site he had been surveying. Had he been caught taking these they might have sacked him on the spot. Then the three of them crafted a beautiful sign and a removable handle to hold it up with. In the end Frau Kramer, brush in hand, went about her task almost solemnly, writing her text on the rectangle stuck with light-brown cardboard. She took a couple of paces back, looked at the words benevolently and read them out in a sing-song voice that Lisa had never heard before.
Now all they had to do was wait. One more week. Until October 7.
That morning they got up early. It was still dark, it had turned cold. After a quick breakfast, they got ready. They wrapped themselves up in thick coats, Frau Kramer put on a beige hat with a narrow, curved rim, she plaited Lisa’s long hair and they left the apartment with a bag full of sandwiches, a few apples, a flask of water and a large cloth bag that Frau Kramer had sewn from a tablecloth, which held the sign. They walked through the narrow streets of the old town to the bus stop and from there to the station. In an old red locomotive they traveled the half-hour to Schwanheide, to the south of Lübeck, boarded the fast train from Berlin to Hamburg, which arrived on time, in Hamburg took the connecting train, an express on its way from Denmark to Cologne, changed at Uelzen and from there took a blue slow train to Friedland.
Throughout this journey lasting many hours Frau Kramer told Lisa stories about herself and Grandfather Wilhelm. She wondered what he looked like now, and Lisa wondered what he looked like at all, for there was no photograph of him and never had been.
When they were an hour from Friedland, Lisa said out of the blue, “What if he’s not there?”
Frau Kramer did not reply. She looked out of the window, where autumn was unfurling her colors, red, yellow, brown, while the wintry gray of bare boughs was in evidence too, because the cold snap had already taken leaves from the trees. She felt that the life or death decision was advancing closer with the speed of two trains hurtling toward one another. Without braking they must inevitably cannon into each other, and Frau Kramer would either throw herself into the arms of one particular man or . . . Frau Kramer took a deep breath and turned to Lisa.
“If he’s not there,” she said, “we’ll go back home.”
Back home? Frau Kramer nodded to herself. Yes, back home. If you have no other place on earth then the only place you can go back to is home, no matter how this might make you feel.
Perhaps Frau Kramer was thinking something different, but one day Lisa would write it down like this, because these were the only words she could find to describe the feeling she had watching her grandmother as the train made its way to Friedland.
25
Who had thrust bunches of flowers into the men’s hands? Who had given them scarves, leather shoes, warm civilian clothing? They looked so well; who had fed and cosseted them? Or was it simply happiness radiating from their faces, causing everything to appear in a different light? Who had given the hundreds of women
, children and old people standing in a scrum at the station entrance, prevented by policemen from storming forward in a frenzied search, who had given them the same idea to stand there now with signs all saying the same thing, the only difference being in the names?
There had to be a collective choreography for occasions such as these to generate images for the news, posterity, the history of an entire country. Had not the skyscrapers of Manhattan been generated in the same way? From a communal awareness that one day it ought to look exactly like this?
Or am I wrong and was I wrong back then, too, because in retrospect everything, even chance, appears preordained? Is it perhaps related to the fact that chance is only ever visible fleetingly, because it creates order, because its nature is to establish rules that appear with such suddenness that they seem to have been devised?
Going down this path doesn’t get you anywhere, Lisa thought. You only make progress if you refrain from searching for things in what you know.
Lisa remembered waiting in the throng of women, children and old people on the wide forecourt between the station and reception center, and her grandmother suddenly breaking out in a sweat despite the cold when she saw a train stopping, a long train from the east, a goods train whose sliding doors were already half open, a train full of gaps through which you could peer into a gloom full of eyes.
Lisa recalled having to help her grandmother because Frau Kramer did not know what to do in her haste, nervousness and love, yes, it must have been love, a love composed of what she still remembered of him, of endless waiting for the possibility that the two of them might have a future, of sleepless nights because she missed him, and of a sinking hope that was, with the words “The prisoners are coming home,” placed on a catapult that had propelled them here, even without any notification that Wilhelm Kramer was coming home, at this time on that particular day, and now the train stopped and the choreography entered a new phase, necks were stretched, signs raised, commentators talked and talked into their large microphones, a man’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers, saying only the obvious, They’re here, the policemen became even more vigilant in their efforts to prevent anyone from making a dash for the train, because despair was hard at the heels of love, now the sliding doors of the goods carriages opened fully and men’s faces emerged, beaming, forming a stream of men, all identically dressed, all carrying bunches of flowers—who had thought of this detail?—and they marched toward the women and children and old people waiting there, standing on tiptoes, and Frau Kramer’s sign read: