by Jurek Becker
His first name was a different story. It was revealing, gossipy. The name Aron had to go if Aron’s ultimate effort was to rid himself of his past. He knew that not everyone could draw a conclusion from such a name, only those who had been inculcated. But they were the whole issue; only one would have been one too many. He knew from experience that thosewho were inculcated could not keep their mouths shut. So they were exactly the ones he needed to throw off track. Then there was the problem of his appearance. He woulddeal with that later, if there was anything that could be changed. Yet it was clear to him that he could use this appearance, should it be necessary, in a deceitful, misleading way. Besides, if a man can look like a horse, he said to himself, and everyone will believe him when he claims he isn’t a horse, then in his case, too, an attempt to put matters straight would not be utterly hopeless. However, this could work only if he had a different first name. With this Aron, people would just smile knowingly and not believe him.
Aron proceeded in a most unusual manner. He swapped two letters. In the appropriate column he wrote his new name, Arno. In case of a formal inquiry, it could be explained as a spelling mistake that had been ignored out of laziness.
But why did he falsify his date of birth?
Why did you make yourself six years younger?”
“Can’t you figure it out for yourself?”
I try, and say, “Because you wanted your son to have a younger father?”
“That too, perhaps,” says Aron. “But why precisely six years?”
This is his only clue. For several days, I think of what meaningthe number six could have. At first a biological reason occurs to me. Six years could lie near a medically significant border — one can’t make oneself randomly younger but only within certain thresholds. Aron would satisfy these conditions with his six years. But he would have told me that.
Only several days later do I find an illuminating explanation, and the number six appears in a new light. The war lasted for six years. Aron was a prisoner in concentration camps for six years. Is he referring to those six years? Ifso, he could have canceled out a bad time and tried, with the only means at his disposal, to reattach the stolen piece of his life. But he makes no comment.
Aron provided the remaining details truthfully, except for trivial issues, like thequestion of his place of birth. He wavered only one other time, when he had to name his job. For a moment he was tempted by the idea of changing all things past. This had less to do with the plan of erasing tracks, he said, than with decade-old dreams and his appearance. Yet he soon gave up the idea of raising himself to the status ofprofessor or doctor, or some other profession. It was immediately clear to him that such a declaration would require verifiable knowledge. So he wrote: Employee.
Aron was given the number of a room in which sat a man who wasn’t really a policeman, for his armband didn’t indicate any sort of rank, it showed only that the occupying forces did not consider him particularly suspicious. Aron handed over the documents. The man verified them and said, “The birth certificate is missing.”
“I don’t have one.”
“What do you mean you don’t have one?”
“It’s gone, burned. Like everything else. Is that so unusual?”
“Please,” said the man, “there must be somesort of proof of who you are. I don’t want to insinuate anything, but I’m sure you’ll understand that these days there are a lot of people who wantto cover up their past. We have to be very careful.”
Aron had expected some such complication, even though he was basically pleased that someone with his face could be taken for a man who wanted to hide his past. He took the certificate of discharge from his last concentration camp out of his bag and simply held it up to the man’s face, very calmly, and ready to take it back — as if its worth could bediminished by excessive looking.
But I mustn’t believe, Aron says, that he was particularly restless. On the contrary, he had been overcome by an astonishing coolness. He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for, he says, and his nerves had, fortunately, held up very well. The man, even if one presumes that he was one of the well-meaning ones, could easily have noticed the discrepancies between Aron’s declarations and the entries on the discharge certificate. After all, in these situations, it should not be entirely insignificant if someone is called Aron Blank and was born in Riga in 1900 or Arno Blank, born in Leipzig in 1906.
“Why did you think of Leipzig, of all places?”
“My late brother was born in Leipzig.”
Aron had been fully prepared, he says, to distract the man somehow — with a heart attack or an emotional outburst — if he had suddenlybecome interested in the details on the discharge certificate. But, to his relief, that turned out to be unnecessary.
The man just glanced at it and said, “All right, all right, thank you.”
Thus it was clear that people who possessed such an ID had, in his eyes, an inexhaustible source of credibility. In an instant he had forgotten his suspicions. Yet this penetrating compassion in his eyes, a sort of participation — Aron found it revolting from the very beginning, but he now bore it for practical reasons. He quickly stuffed the certificate back into his bag, and a couple of hours later he had his papers.
For the first few days, the apartment that was assigned to Aron felt far too luxurious, considering the widespread poverty of the time. It consisted of two spacious rooms with parquet flooring, a kitchen, a bathroom with green tiles, and a long corridor, at the end of which was a large storage space, almost a third room. There was plenty of furniture, carpets, linens, and kitchenware. When Aron first stepped into the bathroom, he found perfumed soap in a container and eleven bottles of bath oils. The whole inventory became his as soon as he moved in, without a receipt or any kind of formal transaction; not a word was said about it.
The decor wasn’t to Aron’s taste but, at first glance, he says, he had been completely satisfied. Yet it was hard for him to get used to the fact that all these objects belonged to him, that he could sell them, use them, or throw them away as he saw fit. At first he reduced his contacts with the apartment to an absolute minimum. There was a luxurious king-size bed in the bedroom, painted white, with soft blankets. When he went to bed the first night, he sighed with pleasure — at last, a decent bed. But the anticipated pleasure proved to be fleeting; a bed does not necessarily mean sleep. Aron lay awake and found no protection from the past. His thoughts rummaged in it, in death and suffering, his two starving children lay beside him, his wife was repeatedly dragged from the room crying. The nauseating smell that his bedmates in the concentration camp exhaled — to which he must also have contributed — would not leave him. He took the oils from the bath and sprayed them around the room. Hours later, he figured that the bed was too wide. He took a blanket, searched the apartment for another place to sleep, and settled in the storage room, which was separated from the corridor only by a curtain. He lay down on the floor, immediately felt the improvement, but nonetheless had to wait until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Now and then, through the curtain and the door to the apartment, he heard steps on the stairs. Time and again he would get up and sneak over to the peephole. Thus he got to know his neighbors, who were still up and about at night. Then that wasn’t enough, and he observed them during the daytime as well. He pushed a table up against the door and put several pillows on it, so that he could sitcomfortably while he watched. He noticed six different men, sixteen women, and sevenchildren; then he kept seeing the same people over and over again. His apartment wason the third floor, so Aron never saw the people on the first and second floors unless they were visiting someone upstairs. That was definitely a disadvantage. Then oneday Aron saw himself sitting like that, on the table, on three pillows, his legs crossed like a tailor, hiding behind his door, in the dark corridor, in the middle of the day. He was shocked, he says, he thought, My God, who in his right mind ever behaves like this? A madman behaves like this, a cretin. How lucky you are
that no one sees you like this. But the restlessness didn’t last long. He simply left his observation post and resorted to the window. Many people look out the window.
He was terribly startled when the doorbell rang for the first time. Through the peephole he recognized the short man with an amputated leg who had given him the key tothe apartment — the superintendent. Before he opened the door, Aron let him ring again.
“Thank God,” said the superintendent.
Aron couldn’t understand the man’s initial concern, or his subsequent relief. He led the super into the kitchen and asked him what he wanted. “Nothing specific, I just wanted to make sure everything was all right,” said the super.
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Let’s be frank,” said the super. “No one has seen you leave the house for at least two days.”
Aron thanked him for his concern, which was totally superfluous in this case — he simply led a withdrawn life. As he spoke, he had to suppress a smile. That someone who had been persecuted for years, who had succeeded in eluding numerous traps only thanks to a thousand tricks and ruses, that this person should now hang himself, or turn on the gas — he found such a thought highly amusing.
Since the man was already in the kitchen, Aron thought he might as well offer him a cigarette. The superintendent thanked him effusively and volunteered his services for any necessary repairs. Aron asked who had owned the apartment.
“You weren’t told?”
At this point the superintendent embarked on an overly long story. Until three weeks before, exactly until two days after the end of the war, a man called Leutwein, who owned the house, lived in this apartment with his wife. A man in his mid-fifties, he had been a party member since the very beginning; his membership booklet had a very low number. Everyone knew that; Leutwein never lost an opportunity to brag about his low membership number. During the war he worked for the government — not in a very important post, he didn’t have sufficient expertise, but he must’ve had influential friends because he was spared service on the battlefield. In return, he was impudent, made great speeches, threw around words such as Wehrkraftzersetzung and durchhalten, he would not tolerate any Elemente in his house.* So he terrified people and was considered an informer. Whether he really was, the superintendent couldn’t say; personally, Leutwein never did him any harm. At the end of the war, everyone wondered why he didn’t clear out immediately. Where to? At least to an area that wasn’t occupied by the Russians. But just then his wife had come down with typhus. Leutwein loved her — these people have feelings too, said the super — he took care of her until the Russians came to get him. They even took his wife, picked her up in an ambulance; that was as much as the super knew.
With this information, Aron felt less awkward about taking possession of the apartment and its contents. It suddenly appeared legitimate. He couldn’t imagine a more just property exchange than the one that had taken place between Leutwein and himself.
Imagine another case,” he says. “Imagine that the apartment had belonged to someone who was more similar to me than this Leutwein. There also must’ve been apartments like that.”
However, he now made a critical selection. With careful eyes, he went over the rooms and tried to look at the objects in the light of their history. Whatever he thought could have contributed to the specific well-being of a National Socialist he put aside. Mainly ornamental objects fell victim to Aron’s censorship. Hardly any furniture, which was for the most part considerably older than the lowest membership number, and was therefore above suspicion. Vases had to be trashed, paperweights, couch pillows and blankets, also the cuckoo clock, and all the pictures. Not just thefamily photographs, oil paintings as well. He describes one of them to me: a farmer follows a plowshare, which is pulled by a strong horse and digs a rut in the dark soil. He had observed this painting often, even before the superintendent had come. Ithung in the corridor, and until that moment had been carefully painted and had pleasant colors. Yet now it disturbed Aron, though he could not logically explain why. Hecould only convey, in passing, random concepts: return to nature, love of the land, the innocent word Arbeit*
(At this early stage, it seems worthwhile for me to provide somedetails of Aron’s biography. These should serve simply to intimate that he grew up and lived not in a particularly exotic environment but rather in one where concepts of value and taste were those of the common man. He was born in Riga, into a family to which piety was a curious phenomenon to be smiled at. While he was still a child, his parents moved with him to Germany, where he lived in Leipzig for a while and later, until the year 1934, in Berlin. Then a woman called Lydia, whose only relationship to Judaism consisted of the fact that she loved Aron, convinced him to leave the country. Aron chose Bohemia, because the textile factory where he was employed had a branch there. Lydia pleaded for an exile even farther away, but he declined;he didn’t have any savings and was entirely dependent on his salary. In Bohemia they married and had three children. After the German invasion they were sent into a ghetto — Lydia too — and then one day she was taken away. Presumably for inflammatory speech. Aron never saw her again; he was left alone with the children, two of whom died before his eyes.)
Aron cleaned out the apartment, throwing things away, tearing them up, and burning them. He also rearranged everything, because he realized that a certain way of thinking can find expression even in the way objects are organized. Sometimes he would hesitate, uncertain whether what he held in his hands or observed deserved his disapproval. Yet the hesitation seemed to be a sort of proof, and so, incase of doubt, he made decisions to the disadvantage of the object. He threw a stackof handkerchiefs into the fire because they were embroidered with a monogram, E.L.
Aron wondered how he would react if one day Mrs. Leutwein would come back and demand her property. Or, worse still, if she would beg for it. A likely possibility; there have been cases of people who recovered from typhus. Aron waited hourly for her to knock. He felt fully prepared for demands or the invoking of so-called rights; he wouldn’t mind calling the police or resorting to some form of violence, even without anyone else’s help. But he was terrified at the thought of entreaties. He imagined the woman sitting in front of him, pale and emaciated from her recent illness, with tears in her eyes or sobbing unrestrainedly, begginghim to leave her the bare necessities. She would say that she was on the street, destitute, her husband was in jail and, besides, she was somehow attached to the thingsthey had lived with for so long. Wouldn’t he let her take at least this object or that? And he heard himself say, after she had begged long enough, “Take whatever you want.” But then, when the expression intended to arouse his sympathy would vanish from her features and she would start amassing things, he would throw her out. In case of emergency, he resolved to think of Lydia.
But Mrs. Leutwein did not come — pride, or death, kept her away. Instead two men visited Aron. They showed their staff ID issued by the occupying forces and said they had instructions to search the apartment for documents that may have been left behind.
“What types of documents?” Aron asked warily.
He learned that in Erich Leutwein’s trial, certain murky points had arisen that might possibly be cleared up with the help of correspondence or certificates of a certain kind. The men also said that they had already been to the apartment once but had perhaps overlooked something at the time.
“You won’t find anything,” Aron said. “I turned everything inside out, there’s nothing. There was only a folder with a couple of letters, and I burned it without reading them.”
“It’s a pity,” the men said, and made as ifto leave. Aron’s words had made the search seem unnecessary; they could thinkof no good reason why he of all people should want to cover for Leutwein. Aron held them back and asked what the unclear points in the trial were. The men looked at each other hesitantly until one nodded to the other. Aron learned that Leutwein had tried to portray his party membership as something he was forced i
nto, his behavior during the war as disapprovingly passive and, as for the undeniable fact that he had not been called to arms — he had always found it incomprehensible. Naturally noone believed him, the men said, yet without proof the outlook was in doubt, and witnesses were nowhere to be found.
“Go to the superintendent,” Aron said, “he knows Leutwein really well.”
They had already been to him, they responded, and to most of theother tenants of the house, yet everyone claimed they knew nothing either good or bad about Leutwein.
Once the men had left, Aron sat for a long time and was annoyed about the absurd care with which these investigations were being carried out. Documents, witnesses, proof, were nothing more than obstacles in the way of a crystal clear deduction. As if there weren’t millions of obvious proofs, as if Lydia wasn’t proof. As if they didn’t know that they were dealing with a sworn gang from which they couldn’t single out witnesses by using tact and by following some rule from an aged law book. Aron simply hoped that what he had just seen was an extremely unusual case, that in other cases procedures were more reasonable andless shortsighted. But already this one case felt like an immoderate dissipation; itwas impossible for him to let it rest. He rushed down the stairs and rang at the door of the ground-floor apartment. The little super opened and smiled at his acquaintance. “Oh, it’s you.” Aron grabbed him by the collar and shook him; the superintendent gasped for air and could not free himself.
“Listen to me,” Aron said. “If you don’t go immediately and confess everything you know about Leutwein, I’ll turn you in. Mark my words, I’ll send you to jail.”
The superintendent didn’t answer, either because he was scared or because his shirt was pulled so tightly around his throat. He simply staredwith bulging eyes and had stopped struggling. Aron repeated, “Right now. Is that clear?”