Kingdom of Twilight

by Steven Uhly

  Perhaps we must know,

  so that we do not become blind in our attempt

  to forget the truth about life

  when we love.

  The truth, my child, is that

  we are alone,

  every single one of us. Forgive me

  for crying over this, forgive me

  for bringing you into this world,

  which has so little joy in store for you.

  But I cannot do anything else.

  Your grandfather,

  whose fate my silence was supposed to bury,

  and who, ever since you have existed inside me,

  speaks once more from every thought

  I send to you,

  once said to me, shortly

  before we were separated and he and your grandmother

  and my siblings

  embarked on the one journey from which there is no return,

  shortly after your father,

  if he is your father,

  and I met because he pointed at me

  and shouted: That one!

  Because he wanted to have me,

  gazing as they do at slave girls

  at the market.

  Your grandfather said: My dear child,

  the secret of life is

  to choose

  what is unavoidable.

  My dear child

  I pass these words on to you

  and hope that

  you will understand them.

  The death of all those who have died,

  whoever they may be,

  is unavoidable,

  and I choose it

  because I don’t want to die.

  Your father,

  whoever he is,

  was unavoidable,

  and I choose him

  in order to love you,

  my unavoidable child,

  so that you may live.

  One day perhaps you will accuse me

  of knowing nothing about love,

  and you will be right about many things.

  But there is one thing I know for certain:

  love is the servant of life

  and of nothing else.

  Do not forget that, my child.

  35

  Aaron Strauss was waiting in the small entrance hall of Oranienburgerstrasse 31, in the Soviet sector, adjacent to the border with the French sector, which began two streets to the west. He was a short, slender man around forty years of age, he kept his reading glasses pushed up on his head, so they were always ready when needed. Without a pair for four years, he had, as if by a miracle, found some glasses which matched his long-sightedness almost perfectly. They had been perched on the nose of a frozen man, half his age at most, and Aaron Strauss had hesitated for a moment, because he felt like a thief, even though the other man no longer needed the spectacles and he was in desperate need of them. Since that day he had sworn never to lose this pair of glasses, he felt as if he were preserving the memory of an unknown man, of whom nothing remained save for the image of a sedentary figure, looking as if he had settled down by the side of the road to catch his breath, from a distance his hair had appeared gray like an old man’s, but then they had come closer, very close, so close that Aaron Strauss was able to think about the glasses for several minutes, so close that he was able to remove them from the corpse without any of the S.S. men noticing.

  Now he stood facing the man coming down the steps in the cold drizzle. He knew this man vaguely, they had met a month ago when Aaron Strauss was waiting with forty-nine Polish and Byelorussian Jews to be picked up by the Bricha lorry and driven to Berlin. The man had impressed on them that they were German refugees from the eastern territories of the Reich and not Jews, Otherwise the Soviets might send you straight back to Poland or somewhere else, he had said, As far as they’re concerned, you see, we don’t exist.

  This last sentence had fixed itself on Aaron Strauss’s mind, especially the tone in which it had been uttered: ironic, almost arrogant, as if the Soviets were stupid. Oh well, Eliezer Ben-Levy, the rabbi traveling with them, had said with a shrug in the lorry, We’ve been so many different things. I hope they’re not going to look for Nazis amongst us. Everyone laughed, the rabbi thrust out his left arm and cried Heil Hitler, affording them a glimpse of his five-digit number, and then they knew that he had been in Auschwitz. On the journey Aaron had been afraid, such tattoos were not customary in Buchenwald so how could he, Aaron, the former Prussian official, prove that he was not a Nazi?

  But the man who now opened the double doors, letting in cold air before he stepped into the entrance hall, had brought them safely to Berlin, dropping them here, Oranienburgerstrasse 31. The house had been provided by the Jewish Community, he said, and nobody had been surprised that such an organization still existed in Germany. That came later. They shook hands. Unbuttoning his long coat and taking off the hat which made him look American, Peretz Sarfati said, “Where are we going?”

  “Have you got everything?” Aaron Strauss replied.

  “I hope so,” Peretz said, lifting up the slim leather briefcase in his left hand.

  “Follow me!” Aaron Strauss said, taking the lead.

  The entrance hall was the only place in Oranienburgerstrasse 31 that was sometimes empty, mainly because it was too cold. As soon as they went up the stairs and stepped into one of the corridors branching off to the apartments, the scene changed in an instant. People sat and lay everywhere, on every conceivable object that could be used as a bed, blankets, old mattresses reeking of damp and mold, chairs and wooden planks shoved together, a few people even lying on the bare stone floor. The house was full of noises, it sounded as if someone was singing somewhere. Somewhere else a person was playing a piano.

  At the end of the corridor they had taken, beyond the last apartment doors, a wooden door was arranged horizontally, a thick coat spread on top. Pushing the coat aside, Aaron Strauss pointed to a flat area in the door’s paneling, where the white paint had not flaked off and thus it was perfectly even, and said, “That’s my desk.”

  “Very practical,” Peretz replied, without changing his expression. He took from the briefcase a printed piece of paper, longer and narrower than a sheet of A4, and handed it to Strauss. The latter felt it with his fingers as a forger might a counterfeit banknote, he sniffed it, he examined the print. Then he looked at Peretz.

  “This is an original. Where did you get it?”

  Peretz shrugged and said simply, “I brought the right label, stamp and fountain pen too.”

  Taking these objects one by one out of the briefcase, he placed them before Strauss on the door that served as his bed and desk. Then Strauss started writing in beautiful Sütterlin script, while all around them, in a building designed for three hundred people at most, a thousand Jews from eastern Europe were reading the Torah, learning modern Hebrew or English, taking music lessons, consuming the daily ration of 300 grams of bread and potatoes and a soup, or simply sleeping to avoid any of this.

  “Today Joseph Stirnweiss, resident in Nauen, and psychoanalyst by profession, appeared before the undersigned registrar, confirmed his identity, and registered the birth of a girl at the district hospital on the first of January in the year nineteen hundred and twenty at seven o’clock in the evening, to his wife, Chawa Stirnweiss, née Grünwald, resident with him in Nauen, and recorded that the child had been given the name Anna.”

  Bent far over the table, Strauss kept writing slowly and with great concentration, repeatedly dipping the fountain pen into the inkpot that Peretz had brought along. He made sure that his letters touched the printed lines where they ought to, that no word strayed across the vertical line on the right, and that the words were correctly spaced on the document, that is to say his writing stopped precisely at the end of the last line. Although he was no longer a public employee, there was still enough of the civil servant in him to revive his routine of many years for this forgery. As he wrote he ran his tongue back and forth
across his lips.

  When he was finished he looked at his handiwork with affection. Then he licked the official label, stuck it in the right place, opened the small pad, inked the stamp and then pressed it on the correct place in the document, one quarter covering the official label, at the bottom right, three quarters covering the document. As the ink dried Peretz made a payment to the man in the form of a packet of Lucky Strikes, which Strauss smoked to temper his hunger, as he put it.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have a place for you,” Peretz said, by which he meant the rest of the payment.

  Then he carefully put Anna’s new birth certificate into the briefcase, shook Aaron Strauss’s hand and left.

  On the way back to the American sector Peretz decided to stop at the black market by the Brandenburg Gate and buy Anna a winter coat, a suitcase, a few clothes, things for the baby and maybe a small case with make-up, nail scissors and things that women need. He would not forget the gold ring. And something else, too, a pretty necklace, a brooch, something to strengthen the bond between them.

  36

  10th October, 1945

  Camp 7525/7 Prokopyevsk

  My dear wife! The pencil is now so short! If I don’t get a new one it’s going to be difficult for the two of us. A letter like this is such a beautiful thing. Some of my comrades are writing too. But I can’t rent out the pencil anymore or I won’t be able to continue. It’s got cold again. Everyone’s terrified of the winter. Your farmer thinks of the old days, when there wasn’t much to do in winter, was there? But here the winter is quite the opposite. The ground freezes, the animals disappear. You have to get food by other means.

  4th November, 1945

  Camp 7527/7 Prokopyevsk

  Are you still there? Do you still exist? Your farmer isn’t a farmer anymore. Your farmer died today. They forced us. We had to lie down in the cold, face down. Then a Russian went from one man to the next. With a pistol. A shot. He spun the barrel. I was the first. With me it went click. Metallic. Really close. My neighbor wasn’t so lucky. How can people do such things? There are new guards here now. They’re different. Look different too. What’s happened? The hunger gets ever worse. We look like skeletons. Our joints have swollen. Arms and legs like sticks.

  24th December, 1945

  Camp 7525/7 Prokopyevsk

  Happy Christmas, my dear wife! I wish we could be together now. We don’t have much to celebrate. Apart from the fact that we’re alive. We sang. Silent night, holy night. Tears came to our eyes. Fritz is a good son to me, he’s just turned seventeen. Younger than Karl was at the time. In some way he’s a son to all of us, the older ones amongst us look after him. It was an absolute disgrace they sent those young boys to the slaughter. They’ve no idea of life and I’m sure they’d perish if we didn’t help them out.

  Sometimes I wonder what got us into this mess in the first place. Was it really Hitler and his gang? Or were we to blame? Does it matter anymore? Shouldn’t we look forward and try to make the best of things? I’m sure you’d have clever answers to my questions, my dearest wife! If I really think about it, then I’m only half a person without you, and you’re the better half.

  I’m so happy that you took Margarita in back then! I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d had to make the decision. According to what the political commissars told us in our re-education sessions, not many were prepared to act in solidarity with the persecuted. The Russians, of course, are just talking about the communists, but I think the Jews got it worse. Here in the camp there are some chaps who are sorry that they didn’t kill all the Jews before the end. I stand beside them and feel ashamed. That time you sent me into town with the grandfather clock, I almost went over to the wrong side. It was only you that held me back. I thank you for that, my love.

  37

  It’s just a letter, Lisa thought. She was sitting on the sofa, tears streaming down her face. Just a letter, the words echoed in her head. It was summer outside, bright light poured into the apartment, cutting sharp-edged shadows into everything, the furniture, the carpet, the walls, her face; but in the letter it was winter, always winter, white and cold. From outside, life blustered into the apartment, children played in the street, cars drove past, in the distance she could hear ships’ klaxons, upstairs Herr Weiss was playing his piano, it was afternoon, 1959, a good year, Frau Kramer had obtained a better job at Hawesta, Lisa was going to commercial college and had fallen in love for the first time.

  A bad year, Maria took out her moods on Lisa, Lisa’s boyfriend was the son of a man who wore a permanent scowl and called other people “scum,” including his own son.

  And now the letter. A beautiful letter, Lisa thought, she was moved by Herr Kramer’s love for his wife, she had never expected so much love, she was happy to have had a grandfather like that. The last lines were beautiful too, so beautiful that the letter slipped from her hands and the tears shot from her eyes as if they had been waiting years for such a moment. Lisa cried without crying. Lisa was sad without being sad.

  She spent the entire afternoon sitting on the sofa, she waited without waiting.

  When Frau Kramer came home and found her like that she sat down and hugged her grandchild. They cried together, only stopping when Maria came in.

  “What’s wrong with you two?” she asked.

  “You’re drunk again.”

  “So what if I am? It’s none of your business. Why don’t you look after your . . . what is she again? Oh yes, your granddaughter.”

  “It’s too late Maria; I know everything.”

  “Oh, so you read the letter, did you? Well, now you know that you don’t belong here!”

  “Maria! How can you say such a thing! I forbid you to talk like that!”

  “You can’t forbid me anything, Mother. I can say what I like. After all, we’re living in a democracy now, aren’t we? Someone told me we had freedom of speech.” She laughed.

  “How on earth did you turn out like this?”

  “How, Mother, how? Let me tell you. Because you never, ever, ever looked at me. You love that girl there more than your own daughter!”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Oh yes it is! You had your own idea of Maria, Maria had to be just so, and if Maria wasn’t just so, then she was Bad Maria, and when she was Bad Maria she was a worse child than Karl, that shining light, Karl the Good, Karl the Dutiful, Karl the Handsome, Karl the Great—Charlemagne!” She stared at her mother and screamed, “Karl the Dead!” Then she burst out laughing, a frenzied, spiteful laugh, and sank into the armchair opposite the sofa. “That’s why, Mother, I turned out exactly how you saw me: Bad Maria.”

  “I never thought you were bad, Maria. Just . . .”

  “Just what, Mother? Tell me, I’m sure you know what’s wrong with me now, finally!”

  “Lost.”

  “What? Is that it? Lost? But I was living with my parents, wasn’t I? Not like this brat here, who ensconced herself with strangers.”

  “Maria!”

  “Oh yes she did! Just so you know, Lisa, I was with my own parents. But life with them was hell, it was like they weren’t my parents at all, that’s what it felt like to me!”

  “Don’t talk like that, child!”

  “Child? That’s right, I stayed a child, Mother, a stupid, little child who goes out on the street and gets drunk and comes home with the sperm of five men between her thighs. And do you know who my pimp is?” She gave a loud and vulgar laugh. Her hands were trembling. “My pimp is Fritz Kleinert, that lovely boy father took under his wing before he kicked the bucket, the one who gave me the letter that brat’s just read.”

  “But . . . how has he . . . ?”

  “Now that’s shocked you, hasn’t it, Mother. Not everything’s so neat and tidy out there. Fritz was sick to death of his family and bored to tears with his fiancée. And then we met and, well, what can I say? It was sex at first sight.” She laughed. There were tears in her eyes.

  Frau Kramer had stop
ped crying. She stared at her daughter. Her fingers shaking, Maria looked in her handbag, took out a cigarette, the cigarette fell to the floor, she took out a second one, put it between her lips.

  “Not in my apartment!”

  Maria stared at her mother, opened her mouth and let the cigarette drop without taking her eyes off her.

  Lisa stood abruptly and left the apartment. Frau Kramer watched her go, she knew where she was off to. She was full of gratitude for Herr Weiss.

  When Lisa had closed the door to the apartment, she leaned against it and slid to the floor, sobbing quietly. On the other side of the door the two real Kramers had begun to argue with each other again, but Lisa paid no attention to their words. She felt as thin as the first layer of skin that grows over a gash, emotions raged, wounding and changing her. All of a sudden she was filled with disgust at everything she usually did. She did not even want to go and see Herr Weiss. She found her whole life repulsive.

  She got up slowly and descended the stone spiral staircase. Once outside she was met by the balmy summer’s evening with its sounds and smells, the street thronged with people. Even though it was late, the darkness had not yet taken possession of everything, a residue of the day lay like a fleeting shimmer on the brick-red walls of houses and on the black of the cobbled streets. Lisa took a right turn at random. After a few hundred meters she opted for a street she had never ventured down before, only to discover that it led her to a well-known and well-trodden place.

  Lisa tried for a long time to find something unfamiliar in little Lübeck. As the streets emptied out and tiredness crept up from her feet into her legs, hips and finally her whole body, she realized that she herself was the only unfamiliar thing in this home town which, as it now transpired, was no more than a waiting room for her too. A waiting room for the truth. It was late by the time she rang Tobias Weiss’s bell. She did it from the street; she did not even want to use her own front door key anymore.