“What beautiful people,” the Prince said. “We will all be the envy of the opera. They will say, ‘There is the grandest family in all of Danzig.’”
Uncle Herman was still in his baggy pants and ruffled shirt. One sometimes wondered if he ever really undressed at all before going to bed.
“Herman, you are not dressed,” Lucia scolded.
“I hate the opera. Lina and I will break the casino tonight,” referring to his current paramour. This one was a redhead. “You people are too fancy for a poor peddler like me.”
“Herman purposely buys his clothing from the war veteran’s outlet, so he can look like a pauper,” Lucia whispered wickedly to their other guests.
“Not really so. I like sausage and dark beer, and simple clothing, what the real people like.”
“And loose women with long red stockings and hair under their arms,” Lucia finished. Her brother chuckled and turned to Jonas.
“Is this really my nephew? He is getting too grown up to be my nephew. Ah, Fräulein, you are doing a wonderful job. You are teaching him well, preparing him for life. Soon the young women will fall at his feet, and I am certain he will know exactly what to do. Right, Jonas? You’ll know what to do?”
Jonas snuck a look at Fräulein Marlow. Every boy has a secret, but usually he is able to share it with a friend. He wished he could tell someone about what he and his governess did when they were alone. This summer had quietly moved their cuddling and his tentative explorations to a new phase that felt frank and unabashed. Sometimes he had a feeling Uncle Herman knew because he was always giving him a knowing look. Jonas had read somewhere that masturbating causes mental illness if you do it too much, but he had never felt better.
“Right, Uncle,” Jonas laughed, his face glowing red. The governess smiled slyly back at him. She caressed the cascade of her long blond hair and pulled her head back, a goddess posing for countless admirers.
On their way to the opera house, Brand explained the story of the Flying Dutchman to Jonas. “The captain of a mysterious ship is doomed to sail forever. He is in love with the young maiden on shore.”
A full moon bedecked the open-air opera house set in a large park surrounded by oak trees and gardens. The sky and the sea were the natural background as the accursed ship rolled silently onto the stage. The elegantly dressed audience applauded the spectacle in sheer delight. Jonas, sitting next to his governess, was absolutely enchanted. Brand was at her other side, Lucia at his right. Bill and the Prince, remarkably handsome in beautifully tailored summer dinner jackets, sat in the center aisle. They, too, were enthralled by the evening and the stage sets.
By the second act, Jonas began to lose interest in the opera and moved uncomfortably in his folding chair. The governess tugged at his trousers and whispered to him. “Stop moving so much. Be good and I will let you touch me tonight.”
Jonas broke from his reverie when the sailors on the ship began shouting, “Yo, Ho, Yo, Ho,” and his body returned to normal. Now that he was older, his erection sometimes occurred without provocation. When the weather turned colder, he could wear his lederhosen, and then it would not be so obvious. And now that Fräulein had taught him how to touch himself to get relief, it made his life bearable. But would he go insane from all of that? It was on his mind constantly. “It will stunt your growth, grow hair on your palms, and make you die early,” he’d heard from the boys at school. He was already taller than most of them. He looked at the palms of his right hand as the Flying Dutchman looked at the picture of his love.
Brand watched the governess out of the corner of his eye as he listened to the passionate music. He had not come to her bed since before Jonas’ illness, and his appetite for her and her rough sexual passion had clearly waned. The danger and risk of having her had once been as intoxicating to him as closing a big deal. And she was still so chillingly beautiful.
He sighed. It is not easy to relinquish power and money, even now. Or a mistress, especially a mistress living in your own house who was also, as he was now certain, a Nazi. How could he manage it? What should he do now? How long could he continue in this fatuous way with them, who held more cards now than he, avoiding decisions that could have most unpleasant consequences?
Brand held Lucia’s hand and closed his eyes. He tried to concentrate on the music, but his teeming brain would simply not allow it. He thought, in this peaceful surrounding, it is hard to imagine that right at this moment in Berlin a madman is convincing the German people to arm and conquer the world, and to rid the land of the Jews.
But the madman was making Brand even richer, he had to admit. He was shipping his coal through the new all-weather port to Germany. Now that he was on top of his trade, his wealth increased by leaps and bounds. Although the political picture was grim, Brand felt confident that business would go on as usual; it always did. Yet, there was always that uneasy feeling, a part of his brain that urged him to sell and run while there was still time. He opened his eyes for a moment and spotted the governess now stroking his son’s hand, which left him with an odd sickly feeling in his stomach. He decided that she was only being nice and there was nothing more to it. Or was there? And had his own recklessness brought it on?
The Prince and Bill sat together, completely immersed in the beautiful music and gorgeous scenery. They had returned to Danzig at Bill’s insistence, together, and had decided that in the fall they would leave Danzig together, and live in Paris while Bill studied at the Sorbonne.
The music at one moment became monumentally powerful and strong, and then came the tenderness, the sweetness of life, love, devotion, and sacrifice. Life is like Wagner, the Prince thought, as he looked at the only real love he had ever known. An unlikely lover, this American who was so unsophisticated and yet so caring; so naïve and decent and unaware that a world was about to change. He, too, had to make decisions. He did not have enough strength now to make the change he’d promised Bill. He did not want to luxuriate on the Left Bank of Paris, and let the rest of the world go to hell. He’d lied to Bill, sweet Bill, innocent Bill, who should have stayed in Columbus, married a nice university girl, and never have let his real self surface.
Bill had taken such risks for him, risks that overwhelmed the Prince and flooded him with joy, and with worry. Bill’s family was not taking his ruse of further study funded by an architectural patron lying down. They had ordered him back, the political environment providing a convenient shield for their growing impatience. Bill’s oldest brother had been dispatched, in fact, to bring Bill home – only to cancel his crossing upon hearing that Germany had become an increasingly inhospitable place, even to Midwestern Americans.
Instead, the Prince would take care of Bill. There would be no Paris. Rather, he would take Bill to Le Havre and give him a ticket on the Liberty back to New York. He imagined Bill sailing to his freedom in a beautiful stateroom, the Prince sacrificing his own true love in order to save him. It was an act, a plan, worthy of a grand opera itself.
“I will meet you in New York, my darling, I promise, and then we’ll find an island where war or politics or other people will never touch us.” That was the prepared speech. Bill had to leave this brutal, nefarious, horrible country. The German people were disappointments, brutes to allow this to happen. He squeezed Bill’s hand one more time. His intuition was that something terrible was going to happen.
Jonas, in spite of the governess’ titillating hand briefly on his, was becoming so bored from the endless-seeming performance that he decided to go to the men’s room to at least take a break from it. As he turned abruptly towards the rear, he noticed a line of men, young men dressed in brown uniforms, carrying clubs. More and more of them were gathering there along the periphery of the park, like an army of hornets. Jonas recognized them.
“Look, Father, at all the people standing in the back.” Brand took one look and, instinctively sensing imminent danger, pulled Jonas and Lucia from their seats in one swift motion, sweeping them away from the theater,
shouting to the Prince and Bill to leave at once.
Before Lucia could even protest, they were heading for a large oak tree. The orchestra played even more loudly, resoundingly, as the Flying Dutchman came on stage with his men. This was the signal. The men in their brown uniforms swept down upon the crowd shouting and screaming, coarse and frenzied: “Heil Hitler! Germany is the future! Danzig must unite!” Brand recognized the man shouting into the megaphone. “The Jews are our misfortune. They must be destroyed.” It was Carl Beyer, a man who had been one of Brand’s employees ten years ago. Incompetent and argumentative, he had been let go. Now he had his day. He wore the uniform of an officer.
They used their clubs freely, striking the shocked and bewildered crowd, now streaming from their seats. The young thugs ran down the aisle to the front, even as Bill and the Prince were edging away.
Jonas and the governess and Lucia were standing behind the large tree when panic swept the spectators. One of the men rushed towards the Prince and struck him on the shoulder yelling, “No fairies in the Third Reich!”
Bill, suddenly enraged, picked up the folding chair he had been sitting on and swung it over his head as the men tried again to strike the Prince, who had stumbled across the aisle. Jonas watched in terror as events unfolded in front of him. Brand yelled at his son, “Lie down, lie down flat on the ground! Don’t move!”
Furtwangler, the conductor, turned towards the screaming audience, shocked and crestfallen, and walked off the podium while the singers and musicians ran aimlessly every which way in this bedlam. The night scenery collapsed. The noises were unbearable. Jonas covered his eyes, but not before one of the hoodlums smashed a beer bottle over Bill’s head and then clubbed his face hard. Blood spurted from the American’s head, a terrible red fountain. Bill tumbled over the chairs, unconscious.
“Father, Bill is hurt! He is bleeding!” Jonas screamed frantically. The crowd tried to disperse, but instead they trampled each other, rampaging cattle in evening dress, crying and cursing. Brand rushed recklessly back into the audience trying to push people aside, away from the seething mass, but it was useless. The panic now created its own momentum. The Prince had fallen and was lying somewhere beneath the crowd. Brand shoved the people aside, desperately trying to reach Bill.
“There is an injured man on the ground! Let me through, for heaven’s sake. Please, please!”
Brand pulled off his torn jacket and swung at the faceless bodies blocking his path. Jonas and Lucia watched, panic-stricken, as Brand struggled to get to the fallen American.
Sirens! Dozens of policemen came running into the crowd, and then the Brownshirts disappeared as swiftly as they had appeared only minutes earlier.
Brand stood over the body of Bill, screaming for an ambulance. He saw the Prince looking pleadingly down at Bill, holding his bleeding head in his hands, sobbing like a lost child. Jonas began to cry too, as he watched a grown man burst into tears. He had never seen a mature man cry. Jonas’ world suddenly vanished before his eyes. He glanced angrily at the governess, seeing no longer a princess, but a witch dressed in a brown uniform. For the few weeks before he became ill, he had begun to have some doubts about his boy scouts, but they swiftly vanished after the governess overcame his resolve by reinforcing his father’s pleasure at the fine work the scouts would be doing for the people of Danzig. “After all, your father is an important man helping Germany become strong. Soon, you will surprise him and tell him that you have been also doing your part and he will be as proud of you as I am.”
Jonas heard his father whisper to Lucia, “They’ve killed Bill.” He had never really gotten to know the young American, but Bill had always been nice to him, and now he was dead. And he realized he could have been one of the boys in the crowd.
There comes a time in a boy’s life when his world of dreams and make believe simply vanishes. The tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the bogey man, all somehow disappear. For Jonas the make-believe world was now gone. He saw his former friends beat and stampede an innocent young man to death.
The crowd opened a path for a stretcher; the Prince followed behind, a walking corpse immersed in the darkest of nightmares. That night, he, too, lost all his illusions and dreams. The serpent was upon him, gnawing at his soul.
A wind was blowing over the deserted beach; dark clouds filled the leaden sky. The beach was covered, as every morning, with hundreds of small and large beautiful amber stones swept in by the tide. Amber stones, the Baltic Sea trademark that few collected because they were as common as the seashells. When he was a child, Jonas had collected a handful and brought them proudly back for his governess, who knew they were worthless and placed them in a drawer to be secretly discarded later. Jonas nonetheless liked to hold and stroke their smooth surfaces, and to hold them up to the light and watch the sun shine through them. What mysteries they must enclose inside. Carrying his small satchel, Astor walking at his side, Jonas as recently as that very morning tested the water and had randomly bent down to look at an arrangement of stones. Gone now was any interest in taking home a prize. The shouts of the boys in town, “Kill the Jews!” still rang in his ears, and the blood spurting from Bill’s lifeless body remained vividly, horribly, in his mind. It all made him shudder and tremble.
So in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Jonas kept to himself, refusing to eat or speak to anyone. He felt betrayed by his governess. In vain, she tried to persuade him that the night was an aberration.
“Those were just very bad people. They are not the same ones at the youth organization,” she pleaded. “It was an accident, Jonas. The New Germany is not going to hurt anyone, I promise.” But she was not able to convince him, perhaps because she now had her own reservations about the new Germany.
“It was not an accident,” Jonas answered. “I saw one of the boys purposely hit Bill with a bottle. Bill was only trying to protect the Prince. The police did not even arrest the bully. If my father had not pulled us out we could have all been killed, like Bill. You, even.”
Jonas found an isolated spot on the beach and made certain there was no one in sight. None of the new, non-Jewish friends he befriended that summer after it became evident his old playmates had dropped him had arrived yet. He sat down on the moist sand and removed a small shovel from his satchel, one he had often used as a little boy to build marvelous castles, complete with roads and bridges. The castle he wanted to live in with his Fräulein and Astor.
He rapidly shoveled a deep hole, Astor looking on curiously. Once satisfied that the hole suited his purpose, he opened the satchel, which contained a book, his magic stones, a crab shell, a small bracelet he had found on the beach which he had intended to give his governess, and his old Nazi armband and uniform. One by one he removed each item from the bag and stuffed them into the hole. He quickly refilled it, stamping down the sand and brushing his foot over the spot.
“Now, don’t dig here, Astor, ever again! We don’t want anyone to find this, or ever know that I was once one of those terrible boys.”
Astor looked up, pushed his nose into the boy’s body, as if he understood. Jonas ran off towards the water, relieved, free, his nasty secret buried forever.
“Hey, Jonas,” he heard someone yelling. Three boys and one girl came running down toward the water.
“What were you burying?” one of them asked.
“I wasn’t burying anything.” Jonas’ face became crimson. “I was looking for treasures.”
“Did you hear that they had a riot at the concert hall last night and that one person was killed?”
“I know. I was there and saw it all,” Jonas said as the young people gathered round.
“Are you telling stories?”
“No,” he said softly.
“I can tell he is telling the truth,” the girl in the crowd said. She was already fifteen and the oldest in the group.
“Won’t you tell us everything, Jonas, please?”
“Let’s go to the cave, and we can sit there while he t
ells us about it.”
Fräulein Marlow was watching the scene from the top window of her bedroom. She was glad that at least Jonas had found some new friends and they were with him now so that he was no longer brooding alone. She watched as they crept toward the caves under the boardwalk. Last night’s violence had unnerved even her. What was intended to be an act of harassment had turned into a brutal atrocity. Now the battle lines were clearly drawn, and she no longer felt secure and comfortable in this household.
Lucia and Brand accompanied the Prince back to Danzig, with the body of the dead American. Uncle Herman stayed behind with Jonas. They helped the Prince arrange the grotesque details necessary to ship the remains back to Ohio. The German news wires reported that the death of the American resulted from being struck by a hit-and-run driver. The Prince and Brand concurred that it was useless to say otherwise and cause even more pain to Bill’s grieving parents. They would soon enough learn the truth.
Lucia marveled at how controlled and even emotionless the Prince seemed, while she, at the very mention of Bill’s name, could not restrain her tears. She searched that handsome face she knew so well for a sign of any anguish, but found none; instead, there was a mask, cold and expressionless, a death mask.
Chapter Thirteen
THE NAZIFICATION OF DANZIG, underway for years, was now complete. Jewish children were no longer permitted to attend school during the day, and so Jewish parents formed their own school, under the direction of Emmanual Echt. This special school was on the Helligstrasse, the very street celebrated for the birth of the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and it was not without savage irony that some of the parents of these “special” students recalled that the great man would have viewed the unbelievable madness as, in his words, “mere phantasmagoria of [his] brain.”
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