I’ve never believed in supernatural phenomena, much less could I have imagined that a university professor like Natércia would be afraid of spooks. But we were busy on the bed once, which was rocking and creaking rhythmically, when, all of a sudden, after a kind of groan at the top of the bookcase, a hardback edition of Don Quixote fell to the floor. Natércia bucked me off, showed me the goose pimples on her arm and said: That was your brother. I told her it was more likely that the structure of the house had given a little, considering the condition of the wooden beams, which were infested with termites, not to mention the cracks in the walls which the books concealed. But engineering catastrophes didn’t faze Natércia, who pulled me into my old room, where we went back to fooling around. She had come out with something odd once before when I had failed in bed and, for lack of anything else to say, I asked if my brother’s dick was much bigger than mine. Suspecting I might be under some kind of spell, Natércia said she knew a shaman who could untie my feet and open all paths for me. At the time I thought she was joking, or just showing off her knowledge of folklore, but after the incident that she classified as the work of an authentic poltergeist, I abandoned my brother’s room for good on her advice, without touching the Quixote lying at the foot of the bookcase. I only went back there to get a few changes of clothes and to see if I could find a cheque, the sort Natércia sometimes slipped under the pillow. I took those tips unwillingly, not least because the cheques were from her joint account with her husband, and the idea that the old boy was supporting me affected my performance. But Natércia was certain I would pay off my debt with interest, just as soon as I won the National Lottery. Every week she would ask if I’d remembered to check the winning numbers, even though I repeatedly told her that, unlike my brother, I didn’t even know how to play the lottery. And one day, seeing me pull on a pair of trousers with poorly stitched hems, she realized I’d appropriated Domingos’s clothes and ordered me to throw them out if I didn’t want to die in poverty. She took one of my old socks to the shaman so he could redo his work, given that the items she had previously spirited away for him to bless belonged to my brother. I had a good laugh about that, because if the powers of her sage were to be trusted, while I had fallen on hard times in the terrestrial world, my brother was hitting the jackpot in some lottery in the afterlife. But the undeniable truth is that shortly thereafter I was catapulted from Portuguese teacher with an obscure blog to polemical social media-based grammar guru, sponsored, as it happens, by the National Lottery. It wasn’t just to make a living, however, that I had begun spending hours in front of the computer, forsaking good literature. When I was done with my work for the day, I felt compelled to visit porn sites, search for explicit sex videos and stay up all night exchanging lewd messages with semi-literate partners. And by the time I got back to the lounge chair, my eyes were tired and my head faraway; I couldn’t concentrate on any book. I read as perhaps my brother once had, as if my eyes slid down a sheet of transparent glass to the foot of the page, only to return to the top of the same paragraph without having taken anything in. I repeat that I have never believed in witches, but, as Sancho Panza and everyone knows, there’s no denying they’re real: que las hay, las hay. I started putting in hourly calls to Natércia, who, newly wed to the former chancellor and emeritus professor of the university, told the secretary never to put me through. May I ask who’s calling? the secretary would ask. What’s it regarding? And there was no way I could get her to give me the mobile number of Dr Natércia’s witch doctor. Via the Internet, however, I contacted psychics of various persuasions who, without exception, believed I was possessed by the spirit of my brother, disembodied at the age of thirty in a sudden and violent manner. For a good while I wasted my capital on energy cures, which quite possibly neutralized one another, because each voodoo priest made it his business to mess with his predecessor’s mumbo-jumbo. More recently a tarot reader texted me to say that those fools had allowed themselves to be bamboozled by an evil spirit: according to the cards my brother had passed away at fifty, after a long illness, in a foreign land. I was already thinking about looking into the matter when a clairvoyant got my home number God knows how, and no sooner had I picked up than he began to reel off the services he provided to the police: solving kidnappings, finding where people were held captive and locating criminals’ hideouts. And without me asking anything, he said that a man by the name of Domingos de Hollander was roaming the outskirts of Greater São Paulo with no memory. For more detailed information he would need an image of him, like a composite sketch that I could get done by a civil police artist. Without thinking twice, I promised to email the clairvoyant a photograph of my missing brother, like the one in Mother’s picture frame, posing à la Rock Hudson. But when I scanned it I realized that no one would recognize my brother, to me forever young like a character in a novel, from that Don Juan of the 1970s. So I aged his portrait with the help of a high-tech program that I worked out how to download onto my computer. In a matter of seconds I saw his voluptuous lips wither, I saw his eyes sink into his head and lose their sparkle, I saw his ears grow long and his cheeks flaccid, I saw oily bumps on his bulbous nose, all over his skin I saw the blotches and fissures with which time punishes human beauty. I made his thick hair grey, then completely white; still not satisfied I gave him a receding hairline, yanked out tufts, made him bald, yellowed him a little and sent him to the clairvoyant. The clairvoyant didn’t reply, so from time to time I sent new messages, produced upcycled versions of my brother, by now in his seventies, until I realized that it was very much in the interest of these police collaborators, leftovers from the dictatorship, to delude me with futile hopes. The theory that my brother had been shuffling here and there for forty years seemed to me as ludicrous as explanations of a cosmic nature. I had written it all off and had returned to my work and solitary pleasures, when just the other day someone rang the doorbell outside normal pizza delivery hours. I saw before me a bald man, tall like my brother but slightly hunchbacked, his face even more worn than the portraits I had forged on my computer, his left cheek sporting the vestige of a scar disguised by a web of wrinkles. He apologized, it was a mistake, he was looking for an old resident of that house by the name of Francisco, and I suddenly discovered that I was face to face with Udo Reichel, who had lost his hair but not the habit of puffing at it. I invited him in, forgetting I had no whisky, or beer, or even coffee to offer him, nor could I ask him to take a seat on the furniture piled high with books that I never unwrapped. We ended up sitting on two boxes in the sitting room, smoking and staring at the floor, until he broke the silence by stomping on a large cockroach. Then he asked if I lived alone, aside from the cockroaches, laughed at the joke and asked after my brother; Udo’s the sort who asks a lot of questions but doesn’t care about the answers. I told him that Domingos had left the house with Ariosto’s girlfriend one day, never to be seen again, but he was referring to my German brother, the one with the avocado-shaped head. I knew nothing of Sergio Ernst either; I feared the worst, and when I started telling him about the Jewish children on the death trains, he interrupted me to talk about his alleged brothers who were also a pain in the arse. He said that every other day some bastard would bring a new court action to get him to take a DNA test. Suit by suit, settlement by settlement, and including his money-grabbing lawyers’ fees, they had already whittled away much of his inheritance from his father, who had died last year at the age of 101, still active, with a penile prosthesis that he’d had implanted at ninety-five. And, apart from women’s arses, old Reichel’s other fetish was World War II relics. He collected military medals, cartridge belts, paratroopers’ buckles, Gestapo insignias, miniature panzers, fighter jets and bombers, in addition to piles and piles of German newspapers, photographs and period documents, among which was a letter that might be of some value to me. The minute Udo pulled the folded sheet of airmail paper out of his pocket, I recognized in reverse the Berlin City letterhead from the document that the police had ta
ken so many years ago from Mimmo’s drawer.
Deputy Mayor
of the Regional Administration of Tiergarten, Berlin
City of Berlin/Tiergarten Town Hall
Secretariat for Childhood and Youth, Child Welfare
To Mr
Sergio de Hollander
Rio de Janeiro
Rua Maria Angélica, 39
South America
24.9.1934
Dear Mr de Hollander!
Some years ago I tried to reach you through the German Legation in Rio de Janeiro to request child support for my ward Sergio Ernst, of whom you are the biological father. Unfortunately, my attempt was in vain. Thus, if I am contacting you again today, I do so in the belief that it is your wish too that the child you fathered gets a good permanent home and a proper education.
For some time now, Sergio Ernst, born on 21 December 1930, has been living in the care of the Günthers, No. 50, Greifswalder Strasse 212/13, courtyard 2. The couple have grown fond of the boy and want to adopt him. The adoption contract has been signed, custody has been authorized by a judge, and the document is currently at the Berlin Regional Court, for the granting of a waiver of the minimum age of fifty and for legitimation.
The court of legitimation is now requesting proof of Aryan origin. This can be demonstrated on the mother’s side. But the boy also has to be of Aryan descent on the father’s side. As such, I must ask you to send me your birth certificate, your parents’ birth certificates and those of your maternal and paternal grandparents. From these certificates it should be possible to infer your forefathers’ religion.
Confident that, in the boy’s interest, you will not refuse my request, I look forward to hearing from you and await the arrival of the certificates.
With the German greeting,
Heil Hitler!
pp
Municipal Welfare Officer
17
Late in the afternoon of 20 May 2013 I board my Lufthansa flight knowing I won’t get any sleep. I didn’t know aeroplane seats were such a tight squeeze, nor that a German beanpole was going to invade my space with his right knee. But after dreaming about this trip for nights on end, I couldn’t possibly close my eyes now that I am making it, even if I were stretched out in first class. I reserved a window seat in the hope that I might see the ocean, but the plane has barely taken off when it pierces the clouds. Above the clouds, at cruising altitude and speed, we more or less follow the Brazilian coast, which Father’s ship skirted in 1929. I consult our route in the in-flight magazine with the funny feeling that I am retracing by air, at almost seventy, the path my father took before the age of thirty. I can even boast that I have probably read all of the books that would have been scattered about his cabin, in addition to so many others that he would only come to know later: Have you read Kafka, Sergio? So what are you waiting for? On his way to Europe Father would still have been occupied with German grammars; at the most he’d have had a go at some children’s fables with a dictionary on his lap. And he’d have worked overtime trying to understand what the hell this letter is all about, if he could have foreseen it in my hands, with his name at the top and signed with a Heil Hitler. After refusing dinner, I accept a beer and rest on the fold-out tray the flimsy piece of paper typed on both sides, which is almost falling to pieces. It is full of creases, as if it has been folded and refolded in different pockets, flattened inside a book beneath books, stretched in a wallet behind banknotes, let’s say Deutsche Marks. Lately I’ve come to suspect that Father returned to Germany with this letter immediately after the war on a propeller plane that made multiple stops. I have no way of confirming that such a journey took place; it would have been prior to my earliest memories and was never mentioned at home. But I can imagine him in a taxi, chain-smoking amid the debris and dust in the eastern sector of Berlin, on his way to the home of the couple who had a few years earlier grown so fond of his son. From what I read in an online encyclopaedia, a cigarette factory was in business at the Günthers’ address until the mid-1930s, when it was repurposed to make military uniforms. I presume that Mr Günther, kept on as janitor or manager of a certain uniform service to the Reich, was charged with supervising the sewing rooms, packaging, storage and loading of goods onto armed forces vehicles. Uniforms left Greifswalder Strasse 212/13 to conquer Europe, grey-green dolmans from its workshops paraded down the Champs-Élysées of occupied Paris. The feared black garments of the SS may also have come out of there, in addition to woollen overcoats that became bloodied and mutilated, or froze with their owners, or were buried along with them on the steppes of Russia. After Germany surrendered, batches of uniforms and fabric cuttings must have remained in stock and the Günthers wouldn’t have known what to do with them. And still reeling from the last rounds of bombing, perhaps horrified by revelations of their country’s recent past, they’d have reluctantly opened the door to that middle-aged man, perhaps a Soviet secret service agent, asking in a deep voice and strong accent for Mr Günther. But as soon as he identified himself as Sergio de Hollander, from Brazil, South America, he’d have been told to scram by the indignant owner of the house. And Mrs Günther wouldn’t have hesitated to report the stranger to the police to prevent him from approaching a minor with sinister intentions. However, considering that the couple only had temporary custody of the child in 1934, and that years later Father still hadn’t gathered all the documents requested by the court of adoption, it seems more likely that the Günthers would have returned my brother to the children’s home at some point, in exchange for an orphan of proven pedigree. And they’d have barely been able to remember the little Brazilian by the time Father knocked at the door, identifying himself as Sergio de Hollander, from Brazil, South America. But they would have been courteous, offered him a seat, served him a cup of watery coffee and wouldn’t have concealed their pride when they introduced him to their heir, a blond boy with chiselled features and blue eyes. Distraught, Father must have gone straight to the Secretariat for Childhood and Youth, determined to take Sergio Ernst with him if he was there, now almost fifteen years old, still waiting for a kind soul to give him a home. He didn’t find him, just as perhaps he found nothing but the ruins of the Secretariat building, and then he’d have wondered if his son hadn’t been recruited at the end of the war, like so many young men in short trousers, to face the tanks of the Red Army. And if he had lost his life in the last battle of Berlin, as so many others had, a relative should have been notified by now. Already braced for the painful news, Father would have knocked at the door of his old love nest at Fasanenstrasse 22 and staggered back in horror, momentarily convinced that the woman smiling at him with only two teeth in her mouth was the mother of his son. But it would only have been a friendly old lady who wouldn’t have refused him the use of her phonebook: Ernst, Ernst, Ernst, Ernst, Ernst, and among dozens of Ernsts there would have been a Miss Anne Ernst, at such-and-such a phone number, such-and-such an address. He’d have got no dialling tone on the old woman’s phone, nor on the phones at the few cafes he found open, and exploring a string of public phone booths that were out of order he’d have arrived at the address he had jotted down, where, quite possibly, a gramophone was playing the waltz from The Blue Angel: Love’s always been my game / Play it how I may … But as for what went on inside that house, I don’t dare speculate. I only imagine that Mother was beginning to fret about the time her husband was taking, since he may have told her he was just going to pop over to Paris quickly for a scholarly conference or a class at the Sorbonne. And when he returned home after a month or more, she’d merely have asked: Sergio, did you find what you were looking for? And Father would have replied: No, Assunta.
My German Brother Page 14