The Good German

by Joseph Kanon

  The voice of the Kiwanis Club lunch, bland and sure of itself. In the awkward silence, Jake could feel Tommy shift in his chair, leaning forward to see Bernie’s response.

  “We’re an even smaller minority here,” Bernie said calmly. “Most of us are dead.”

  “I didn’t mean you personally, of course.”

  “Just all the other Jews in the program. But we speak the language, some of us—one of life’s little ironies—so you’re stuck with us. I was born here. If my parents hadn’t left in ’thirty-three, I’d be dead too. Personally. So I think this is a priority.” He touched the pile of papers on the table. “I’m sorry if it interferes with economic recovery. As far as I’m concerned, you can file that under T for ‘too bad.’ I’m a DA back home, that’s why they tapped me for this. DAs don’t get revenge. Half the time, we’re lucky to get a little justice.”

  Breimer, who had turned red during this, sputtered, “I didn’t mean—”

  “Save it. I know what you mean. I don’t want to join your country club anyway. Just send me more staff and we’ll call it quits.” He pulled the chair beneath him and sat down, cocking his head toward the door. “I think your driver’s waiting.”

  Breimer stood still for a moment, furious, then visibly collected himself and nodded to the quiet table. “Gentlemen.” He looked down at Bernie. “We’ll talk tomorrow, captain. I hope I’ll be better understood.”

  The entire table watched him go. Jake looked around, waiting for someone to speak, feeling the room grow warmer, as if the quiet were letting in the sticky night air. Finally Muller, staring at his glass, said dryly, “He’s here to learn.”

  Tommy smiled at him and lit a cigarette. “I wonder what he’s really doing here. Guy doesn’t take a leak unless American Dye tells him to go to the bathroom.”

  “Hey, Tommy,” Ron said, “do me a favor. Lay off. I’m the one who gets the complaints.”

  “What’ll you do for me?”

  But the earlier mood was gone, replaced by something uncomfortable, and even Ron no longer wanted to play.

  “Well, that was nice,” he said to Bernie. “We have to live with this guy, you know.”

  Bernie looked up from his stew. “Sorry,” he said, still on edge.

  Ron took a drink, looking at Tommy. “He seems to bring out the best in everybody.”

  “Small fry,” Bernie said, imitating Breimer’s voice. “Whoever that is.”

  “Anybody but Goering,” Tommy said.

  “Small fry,” Bernie said again. “Here’s one.” He reached into the pile and pulled out a few buff-colored sheets. “Otto Klopfer. Wants to drive for us. Experienced. Says he drove a truck during the war. He just didn’t say what kind. One of the mobile units, it turns out. The exhaust pipe ran back into the van. They’d load about fifty, sixty people in there, and old Otto would just keep the motor running until they died. We found out because he wrote a letter to his CO.” He held up a sheet. “The exhaust was taking too long. Recommended they seal the pipes so it would work faster. The people were panicking, trying to get out. He was afraid they’d damage the truck.”

  Another silence, this time so still that even the air around Bernie seemed to stop. He looked down at the food and pushed it away. “Fuck,” he said, embarrassed, then stood up, gathering his files, and left the room.

  Jake stared at the white tablecloth. He heard the old man quietly clearing the plates, then the muffled scrape of chairs as Muller and the MG end of the table got up to leave. Tommy ground his cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Well, I’ve got a poker hand waiting,” he said, subdued now. “You coming, Jake? Everybody’ll be there.”

  The floating game of the war, still going on, press tents filled with smoke and battered typewriters and the steady slap of cards.

  “Not tonight,” Jake said, looking at the table.

  “Let’s go, Ron. Bring your money.” He stood up, then turned to Jake. “Take a gun if you go out. The Russians are still all over the place. Once they get liquored up, it’s like Dodge City out there.”

  But they’d be rowdy, roving the streets in packs, their good time its own warning. It was the others, the shadows gliding through the rubble, who’d pounce in the dark.

  “Where was Breimer going?” he said to Ron.

  “No idea. I’m the day shift. Let’s hope he gets laid.”

  “Talk about punishing the Germans,” Tommy said, and then they were gone too and Jake was alone in the quiet room. He poured some more wine. The old man returned and after a quizzical look at Jake began emptying the ashtrays, carefully straightening the butts and putting them on a separate plate. Occupation currency.

  “Would you like anything else?” he said in German, brushing the tablecloth.

  “No. I’ll just finish this.”

  “Bitte,” he said, as polite as a waiter at the Adlon, and left.

  Jake lit a cigarette. Had Otto Klopfer smoked in the cab while he ran the motor, listening to the thumps behind him? There must have been screaming, a furious pounding on the van. And he’d sat there, foot on the pedal. How could they do it? All the questions came back to that. He’d seen it on the faces of the GIs, who’d hated France and then, confused, felt at home in Germany. The plumbing, the wide roads, the blond children grateful for candy, their mothers tirelessly sweeping up the mess. Clean. Hardworking. Just like us. Then they’d seen the camps, or at least the newsreels. How could they do it? The answer, the only one that made sense to them, was that they hadn’t—somebody else had. But there wasn’t anybody else. So they stopped asking. Unless, like Teitel, the hook had gone in too deep.

  Jake looked around the empty room, still feeling the disturbance. Once, in Chicago, he’d worked the crime desk and the rooms had felt like this, the uneasy quiet that follows murder—the body covered but everything else disordered. He remembered the indifferent photographers, the policemen picking through the room dusting for prints, the numbed faces of the others, who didn’t look back at you but sat staring at the tagged gun in a daze, as if it had gone off by itself, and he realized suddenly that he had seen it all again today, that what the city had really become was not a bomb site but a vast scene of the crime. Shaken, waiting for someone to bring the stretcher and erase the chalk marks and put the furniture back. Except this crime wouldn’t go away, even then. There would always be a body in the middle of the floor. How could they do it? Sealing pipes, locking doors, ignoring the screams? It was the only question. But who could answer it? Not a reporter with four pieces in Collier’s. The story was beyond that, a twisted parody of Goebbels’ big lie—if you made the crime big enough, nobody did it. All the pieces he might do, full of local color and war stories and Truman’s horse-trading, were not even notes for the police blotter.

  He got up from the table, his head thick with drink and the humid air. In the hall, the old man was standing in front of an open door, listening to the piano. Soft music, barely louder than the clock. When he saw Jake, he moved away, a concertgoer giving up his seat. Jake stood for a moment, trying to place the music—delicate, slightly melancholy, something nineteenth-century, like the house, a graceful world away from the abrasive dinner. When he looked through the door, he saw Bernie bent over the keys in a pool of dim light, his tight wavy hair just visible across the well of the piano. At this distance his body was foreshortened, and for a second Jake saw the boy he must have been, a diligent practicer, his mother eavesdropping down the hall. It’s something you’ll have all your life, she would have said. A nice boy, not gifted, who kept his eyes on the keys. Not yet a terrier, ready to take offense. But perhaps it was only the room, the first real Berlin room Jake had seen, with its tall stove in the corner, the piano near the window to catch the light. In the old days, there would have been cake with coffee.

  Bernie kept his head down after he was finished, so that Jake was at the piano when he looked up.

  “What was it?” Jake asked.

  “Mendelssohn. One of the Songs Witho
ut Words,”

  “Beautiful.”

  Bernie nodded. “Also illegal, until a few months ago. So I like playing it. Rusty, though.”

  “Your audience enjoyed it,” Jake said, nodding to the hall where the old man had been.

  Bernie smiled. “He’s just keeping an eye on the piano. It’s their house. They live in the basement.”

  Jake took this in. “So that’s why the plate.”

  “It’s all they have left. They hid it, I guess. The Russians took everything else.” He waved his hand at the room, which Jake saw now had been stripped of knickknacks, the afternoons of coffee cakes just his imagination. He looked down at the piano, covered in cigarette burns and water rings from wet glasses of vodka.

  “We haven’t met. I’m Jake Geismar.” He held out his hand.

  “The writer?”

  “Unless there’s another one,” Jake said, pleased in spite of himself.

  “You wrote the piece about Nordhausen. Camp Dora,” Bernie said. “Jacob. As in Jewish?”

  Jake smiled. “No, as in the Bible. My brother got Ezra.”

  Bernie shrugged. “Bernie Teitel,” he said, finally shaking Jake’s hand.

  “So I heard.”

  Bernie looked at him, puzzled, until Jake cocked his head toward the dining room. “Oh, that.” He looked away. “Bastard.”

  “You really don’t want to join his country club, you know.”

  Bernie nodded. “No. I just want to pee in his pool.” He stood up and closed the piano lid. “So what are you doing in Berlin?”

  “The conference. Looking for a story, like everybody else.”

  “I don’t suppose I could interest you in the program? We could use some press. Life was here. They just wanted to know how our boys were doing.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “Oh, fine, fine. Nobody fraternizes, so nobody gets the syph. Nobody loots. Nobody’s making a dime on the black market. Just handing out Hershey bars and keeping their noses clean. Any mother would be proud. According to Life.” He picked up his files to go.

  Jake lit a cigarette and looked at him carefully through the smoke. A DA, not a boy playing Mendelssohn.

  “What’s going to happen to Otto Klopfer?”

  Bernie stopped. “Otto? Summary court. He’s not big enough for the Nuremberg team. Three to five, probably. Then he’ll be back driving a truck. But not for us.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “We can’t prove the actual killing. No witnesses in the van. If he hadn’t sent the letter, we couldn’t prove anything. We’re sticklers for the law here. We don’t want to start an inquisition,” he said, back in his dining room voice. “We’d rather cut the Nazis a little slack.”

  “Summary court—that’s you?”

  Bernie shook his head. “We try to keep the foreign-born minorities out of court. In case they’re not—impartial. I’m just the hound. Right now I’m on the fragebogen.” He touched the files. “Questionnaires,” he translated. “‘Were you a member of the party? BDM?’ Like that. They have to fill one out if they want a job, a ration card.”

  “Don’t they lie?”

  “Sure. But we have the party records, so we check. Wonderful people for keeping records.”

  Jake stared at the bulky files, like a hundred message sticks in the rubble.

  “Could you locate somebody with those?”

  Bernie looked at him. “Maybe. If they’re in the American zone,” he said, a question.

  “I don’t know.”

  “The British files would take a while. The Russians—” He let it dangle, then said gently, “A relative?”

  “Somebody I used to know.”

  Bernie took out a pen and scribbled on a piece of paper. “I’ll see what I have,” he said, handing him an office number. “Come by tomorrow. I have a feeling my three o’clock will be canceled.” He left the piano, then turned back to Jake. “They’d have to be alive, you know.”

  “Yes. Thanks.” He pocketed the address. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  Bernie shook his head. “Have to get back to work.” He shifted the files under his arm, running late again.

  “You can’t get them all,” Jake said, smiling a little.

  Bernie’s face went hard. “No. Just one at a time. The way they did it. One at a time.”

  It took over an hour the next morning to find Frau Dzuris, in one of the crumbled streets not far from the British headquarters in Fehrbelliner Platz. Plaster had fallen off the front of the building, leaving patches of exposed brick, and the staircase smelled of mildew and slop buckets, the signs of a broken water line. He was shown to the second floor by a neighbor, who lingered in the hall in case there was trouble. Inside, the sounds of children, immediately silent after the knock on the door. When Frau Dzuris opened it, looking frightened, there was the faint odor of boiling potatoes. She recognized him, her hands fluttering to smooth her hair and drawing him in, but the welcome was nervous, and Jake saw on the children’s faces that it was the uniform. Not sure what to do, she insisted on introducing everybody—a daughter-in-law, three children—and sat him at the table. In the other room, two mattresses had been pushed together.

  “I saw your notice in Pariserstrasse,” he began in German.

  “For my son. He doesn’t know we’re here. They took him to work in the east. A few weeks they said, and now look—”

  “You were bombed out?”

  “Oh, it was terrible. The British at night, the Amis in the day—” A quick glance, to see if she had offended him. “Why did they want to bomb everything? Did they think we were Hitler? The building was hit twice. The second time—”

  The daughter-in-law offered him water and sat down. In the other room, the children watched through the door.

  “Was Lena there?”

  “No, at the hospital.”

  “The hospital?”

  “Not hurt. She worked there. The Elisabeth. You know the one, in Lützowstrasse. I said it was God protecting her for her good works. You know, the others, in the basement, didn’t make it. Herr Bloch, his Greta, everybody. They killed them all.” Another glance. “Herr Bloch wouldn’t go to the public shelter. Not him. But I never trusted the cellar. It’s not deep enough, I said, and you see it wasn’t.” She had begun to wring her hands, and Jake saw the flesh of her upper arms hanging in folds, like strips of dough. “So many dead. Terrible, you can’t imagine, all night—”

  “But Lena, she was all right?”

  She nodded. “She came back. But of course we had to move.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She had a friend from the hospital. After that, I don’t know. It was hit too, I heard. A hospital. They bombed even the sick.” She shook her head.

  “But she didn’t leave an address?”

  “With me? I was already gone. You know, there wasn’t time for addresses. You found whatever you could. Perhaps she had relatives, I don’t know. She never said. You can’t imagine what it was like. The noise. But do you know the strange thing? The telephones worked right to the end. That’s the thing I remember about Pariserstrasse. The bombs and everybody running and there was a telephone ringing. Even then.”

  “And her husband?”

  “Away somewhere. In the war.” She waved her hand. “They left the women for the Russians. Oh, that was terrible. Thank God I—” She glanced toward her daughter-in-law. “I was lucky.”

  “But she must be somewhere,” Jake said.

  “I don’t know. I told your friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “The soldier yesterday. I didn’t know what to think. Now I see. You didn’t want to come yourself, that explains it. You were always careful, I remember. In case Emil—” She leaned forward and put her hand on his arm, an unexpected confidante. “But you know, none of that matters anymore. So many years.”

  “I didn’t send anybody here.”

  She withdrew her hand. “No? Well, then, I don’t know.”


  “Who was he?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t say. They don’t, you know. Just, how many are living here? Do you have milk cards for the children? Where did you work in the war? It’s worse than the Nazis. Maybe he was counting the dead. They do that, so you can’t use the name for the ration cards.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Did I know where she was living, had I seen Emil, that’s all. Like you.” She looked at him. “Is something wrong? We’re good people here. I have children to—”

  “No, no. Nothing. I’m not here for the police. I just want to find Lena. We were friends.”

  She smiled faintly. “Yes. I always thought so. Not a word from her,” she said, as if she still hoped for a chat over coffee. “So proper, always. Well, what does it matter now? I’m sorry I can’t help. Perhaps the hospital would know.”

  He took out his notepad and wrote down the Gelferstrasse address. “If you do hear from her—”

  “Of course. It’s not likely, you know. Many people left Berlin before the end. Many people. It was hard to find a place. Even like this. You see how we live now.”

  Jake looked around the shabby room, then stood. “I didn’t know about the children. I would have brought some chocolate. Perhaps you can use these?” He offered her a pack of cigarettes.

  She widened her eyes, then grabbed his hand and shook it with both of hers. “Thank you. You see,” she said to her daughter-in-law, “I always said it wasn’t the Amis. You can see how kind they are. It’s the British who wanted the bombing. That Churchill.” She turned back to Jake. “I remember you were always polite. I wish we were back in the American zone, not here with the British.”

  Jake headed for the door, then turned. “The soldier yesterday—he was British?”