He nodded. But where I expected bitter words, all I got were his watery eyes. And they were the real surprise. I hadn’t imagined that what they contained were tears.
He hung his head so that I couldn’t see. “Why did you write that?” I heard him say, the words trickling up his nose, his forehead, the stubble of his hair, to my ears.
“Write what? Which part? I wrote about the party, I wrote about our selling the car…”
“All that. About me.”
“What did I write about you? All I remember that I wrote about you is that you didn’t really participate in our drunken brawl.”
“You said I was queer.”
“What? I did not. Of course I didn’t.”
“You might as well.”
“By saying you didn’t get drunk? By suggesting you might have had a feather’s worth of good sense?”
“Jews think everyone’s queer.”
“Jesus. Come on. Richard.”
“You can have my invention.”
“Thank you very much. But it wasn’t exactly something you could patent, you know.”
“Then fuck off.”
He was so skinny he looked deflated to me then. Or he could have been both skinny and deflated, all that was left of him was bones and sorrow.
“Come back. What shit. This is stupid,” I said. Suddenly it sounded to me like I was talking to a woman. The insane things you say to get her back.
But I did want Richard to come back, despite all my pronouncements about open doors. He had always been my favorite. He’d become like a mascot. And I hadn’t even known it.
He shook his head, or it seemed to shake itself, like the head of a raggedy doll. He disappeared into the maw of the sour apartment. I waited longer than I would care to admit for him to change his mind.
In due course I conducted interviews and recruited a new fourth member for our crew. Günther was an efficient little savage whose specialties were carburetors and, as I later learned, harassing Africans on the U-Bahn. Skin Enterprises continued its mission of showing how the most discontented elements of the Eastern citizenry might yet be brought into the western settlement, and of course how a Jew could learn to love his enemies for fun and profit.
I wrote more columns about it all, especially when I realized the columns worked as advertising for the cars. But I never wrote a word, until now, about Richard, whom I found I continued to miss. It wasn’t to protect him that I kept that silence. I may have been too successful in the love-thine-enemies area. I didn’t want the world to think I was a wuss.
HOLLY ANHOLT
Boyfriend
I’LL SAY ONE THING more about Nils, mention one thing more, something he said the night we met, at Oksana and Herbert’s party. It wasn’t only his words but their jagged, discontinuous appearance, they connected so tenuously to our trite back-and-forth up till then that they must have been waiting there all along, a certain pressure building, like a chick ready to come out of its shell, ready-or-not-here-I-come. We’d been talking about my fleabag hotel, where as a reporter he’d once covered a murder. Nils said: “You know the dirty secret of every professional in Germany today? That if it wasn’t for the mass murder of the Jews, half of us wouldn’t have a job.”
He said it very calmly, very conversationally, as if it were no big deal, as if he’d hardly changed the subject. Maybe he hadn’t, really. Reporters, professions, his life, his career. Of course I didn’t know what to say.
I caught his squint, then averted my glance, like a reluctant witness to a crime. My silence forced him to go on.
“And how many would give their job up, if the Jews could come back to life? It’s what we call a competitive advantage, to be alive.”
“Do you think about it?” I lamely asked, wanting to help, wanting to say anything at all.
He said: “You don’t have to think about something when it’s in the air you breathe. There are ghosts around. Ghost doctors and ghost lawyers and ghost professors and ghost businessmen and ghost editors and ghost artists and ghost actors and ghost biologists and chemists, and ghost reporters. All you have to do is dream about them.”
And: “We can even ask ourselves, we German professionals and intellectuals and artists of the post-war: are we doing as good a job as those who are missing would have done? Or is it even possible, our consciences pricked, that we’re doing a better job, or anyway a different job, or, heaven help us, a more German job?”
He was still in that conversational voice, steady, a little bit steely, as if at cost to him somewhere along the line he’d learned the secret of preserving emotion in the amber of facts.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, of how I became sure that Nils would be my boyfriend. Later, after I met his friend David, I pointed out to Nils that his best friend David was a journalist, and he was Jewish. “Precisely. My best friend in the world. But would I give him my job? That fat fuck?” Nils had a laugh like a crow sometimes, when he was really amused, and a triumphant snort could sneak through his sobriety.
NILS SCHREIBER
Girlfriend
ON MULACKSTRASSE IT LOOKED as if nobody had collected trash since the Wall fell. Empty lots like missing teeth, competing graffiti, foreigners out, Nazis out, on every exposed wall, and the faint traces of Yiddish over what had once been shop windows but were now as often as not boarded over. As midnight approached, a naked light bulb hung over a single open storefront. The storefront announced itself as an art gallery. In a spirit of bored curiosity, we entered. There were stairs and arrows leading to the basement. When we got down there, we had to walk over broken glass to get to the art, which was a dead rat suspended in the coal bin. Holly stifled what seemed like an unlikely scream. A girl with neon hair laconically held out a donation cup. I dropped a couple of marks in it. Holly wore flats with thin soles and was afraid she would cut her feet on the glass. The gallery was housed in the building her father had once owned, but her parents had never lived there and Holly showed little interest in this, her second claim. This was despite my suggestion that it might one day be worth a pile, that the old ghetto of the Scheunenviertel – centrally located, morbidly appealing, and left to rot during the GDR – was already showing signs of being Berlin’s next neighborhood of the future.
FRANZ ROSEN
Hero
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT MYSELF. I was born into prosperous circumstances. My father owned an industrial firm which processed tungsten for the production of electric light bulbs. He was a confidant of Walter Rathenau, the assimilationist business leader who became the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister in 1922 and was assassinated. When I was young, I led the life of a little prince. My elder brother was destined for the family business. I would be an artist, or a writer, or simply a dandy. My heroes were the assimilated Viennese writers with pens of quicksilver, Roth, Zweig, and (unfortunately if inevitably) for a certain period Weininger, who equated Jewishness with femininity and condemned them both. My father was neither a prophet about the Nazis nor a fool. When they came to power, he had the idea, I believe, of ducking down and muddling through: this too shall pass. A great believer in Germany’s modernity, he perhaps underestimated fascism’s appeal to that very modernity, a mistake in which of course he would not have been alone. My brother Paul was arrested and badly treated. On his release, he had sunken eyes. My father commenced considering emigration for us all. Paul was rearrested. This second time they sent him home in a box with his overcoat stuffed in. My father died of a broken heart. My mother suffered a nervous breakdown and the diagnosis of cancer virtually at once. It became too late to leave. We lost everything to confiscations. My mother was relocated to an overpopulated apartment in the ghetto of the ostjuden, where she promptly died, either from her cancer or the embarrassment of her new circumstances. I went underground in the city. My complexion and hair made me look sufficiently “Aryan.” I had never quit attending the city’s nightclubs, even after there were prohibitions. Now I made contact with ot
her “U-Boaters,” as we were called, Jews who lived as we could, and we formed a loose alliance. My self-proclaimed role in “the underground” was to use my familiarity with the demimonde to begin love affairs with German officers, and to glean information which I passed along an uncertain chain. My circumcision proved an inevitable problem. I had to be both deft and clever, and in one instance, to an SS man who conceived a true crush on me, I was forced finally to admit who I was and to depend on his love and mercy. When these came into question, or more specifically when he tried to convert me into a “snatcher” of other Jews, I murdered him and retired into the depths of the socialist neighborhoods. On the war’s end, I met a camp survivor named Herbert Kaminski. Through Herbert, my deeds became known to the Americans. Soon they earned me modest honors, which were then magnified in the new West Germany’s wish to find whatever saving graces it could in the disgraceful past and to put a distance from the rest. I became Herbert’s right hand man in his expanding business ventures. At first this consisted of nothing more than collecting rents from whores and pimps. But Herbert had bigger things in mind. “Somebody will have to rebuild this city. It may as well be us, its human rubble.” Of course we were all human rubble then, we Berliners, but Herbert considered us the rubble of the rubble. As money for reconstruction flowed in, our new construction company received its share and perhaps more. I had always been handy with figures, and now I abandoned my dreams of literature and became the one Herbert trusted with his numbers, his “Jew,” as it were. My fortunes were restored. I imagined, despite my inversion, that my father would have been proud of me. I came to be considered a wise man in Berlin’s miniscule remnant of a Jewish community. I became, at long last, a Zionist, and when the West German government established reparations funds to aid Israel, I was named trustee of one such fund. I turned ascetic as well. My dandy days gone, I donned a dark overcoat like my brother’s in all sorts of weather. It was apparent that I was one of those whom the war had singled out to recast into an unlikely hero. I often spoke at those inspirational occasions held in Berlin’s churches where the theme was “never again.”
In addition, I wished to do my part to help my Israeli brothers find peace in their new land. I attended conferences and sent money. At one such conference on the question of refugees, my heart went out to a young Palestinian. He called me his rose. This may sound at once preposterously kitsch and obvious, but its very simplicity touched me. It was not so much the end of my asceticism as the beginning of a devotion. From the start I knew that Khalil could lie to me. He often did. Yet I was touched by his usual affection, by his periods of “making up,” and by the dispossession he had suffered, both different from and similar to my own, as if we occupied two wings of a triptych separated by a middle that was dark and unintelligible. From the outset my Zionism had been tinctured by the old European dream of a Jewish state that would be a moral beacon to the world’s nations. After the war in 1967, I was shocked that Israel did not promptly vacate the various territories it had occupied, and in particular by its claim to keep all of Jerusalem forever. A rift developed between my ideal Zionism and the reality, a rift which I could only partly paper over by remembering that I lived in “safety” in Germany. And so when the Gulf War began in ’91 and Israel was under assault by Saddam’s missiles and there were legitimate fears of gas attacks, I was already prepared to have my moral sense cleaved. Khalil plied me with reports that, despite Israeli denials, Jews were being issued gas masks while Palestinians in the occupied territories were not. “Thousands will die. It’s what they want, to have no Palestinians left.” Despite Khalil’s hyperboles, the injustice rankled. The East German state had warehouses full of unused gas masks. Inasmuch as it could be imagined that Israel simply hadn’t enough gas masks to go around, I initially tried to broker a deal whereby Israel would grant asylum to a certain high-ranking Stasi man who happened to be Jewish in exchange for the East German gas masks. “Two for one,” I suggested. “You get the ability to live up to your moral responsibility and one newly minted Jew.”
Israel refused. Khalil continued to goad me. I finally determined that it would only be just if I took one year’s interest from the reparations fund of which I was trustee and with it purchased the East German gas masks for Palestinian use. I had no inkling when I did so that Khalil was playing a double game with me: even while he was urging me to act, he was informing a Berlin reporter of my every action. “For arms, asylum, that is the deal,” “a million gas masks,” “millions of marks.” And so on. He hoped, in effect, to involve me, and Israel, and Israeli-German relations, in a dreadful scandal. He hoped to ruin me, or at the very least he didn’t care if he did, if in the bargain he could harm Israel.
You may perhaps see the outlines of a morality tale here, or perhaps a tragic hero’s fall. But I warned you at the outset that this was a story about myself. Perhaps, for greater warning, I should have put the word “story” in italics. The reason being that certain all-important portions of this story I’ve told – comforting received wisdom though they had become to many – are just that: a story. I am referring to my so-called “war record,” my actions in an underground Jewish resistance in Berlin during the war, my heroic, or whatever you would say, murder of an SS officer. Lies. All lies. Or if you will, perhaps, the only genuinely literary act of Franz Rosen’s career. I spent the war in cowering terror in a coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg, afraid in nearly equal parts of being exposed and being bombed. The only sex I had was with a haberdasher who owned the building. He was a Nazi for sure, but the only secret information he held was his sexuality. I suppose that my “underground” fantasy started with nothing more than the basement I found myself in. I could go no lower in life than I found myself, but I could fly on wings of imagination. Is it possible for a lie to begin in metaphor? I imagined the underground of which I would be a gallant queer part, I imagined each of my Nazi lovers and the secrets they would divulge, I imagined how I would kill when I had to. These were even fantasies that I elaborated in acts of love with the haberdasher, who excited my pity and contempt. And of course in the war’s aftermath there were those with complementary desires, those who wished to believe in Jews in underground activities here – so it was a convenient lie as well. No one, finally, had the heart to check it out too carefully. I wish I could say that the war had made me a killer. But it had made me a liar.
And it had done one thing more: it had exposed to my unavoidable stare my sexuality. Previous to the war I had had sexual liaisons, but with women, prostitutes chiefly, apparently in order to prove to myself my masculinity, to overcome a terror of the vagina which at the time I took to be ordinary and inevitable. My first inklings that things might be otherwise came in my affection for my brother’s friends, who were hearty, athletic types, exemplars, really, despite being Jewish, of the estheticized, sexualized public sphere which the Nazis created, in which bodies and athleticism were worshipped. But these secret affections led me nowhere. It took the coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg to make things clear to me. My haberdasher was a brute, but astute enough, in his sexual instincts if little else. He spoke to me often about the mistreatment of the Jews being taken too far, as if to remind me how lucky I was and to persuade me of his compassion on which I depended. That compassion, however, he extended only to certain sorts of Jews, the artistic, the philosophers, the heirs to Heine as it were, not to the stock exchange Jews whom he blamed for the troubles of all of us; these feelings being in truth not far from ones I’d felt myself when I was young. He was conscripted to the Volkssturm in February of the war’s last year. I have no idea what became of him.
Now came the Gulf War and my betrayal of my trust and Khalil’s betrayal of me and the entry into my life of Nils Schreiber, the reporter from our city’s progressive daily to whom Khalil confided and who became my relentless Javert. I have nothing but favorable reviews to offer of Nils Schreiber. More in point, I fell in love with him, at an age when I had felt I was almost beyond that possibility. He s
eemed so superior to Khalil in every particular, moral, emotional, physical, even I would say his height, his eyes, his voice, that I began to wonder if I was seeing in myself some late-blooming racism. Not that I ever had the remotest hint of an affair with Nils Schreiber. He was surely an active and satisfied heterosexual, involved for a considerable period with a pretty American girl. Rather, I loved him at a distance which decreased while my love grew, as a fox might love an able hound. Finally he had all the pieces in place. He cornered me in a beach cottage in Sicily to which I had fled. I was not displeased to see him. Other than in social settings, it was the first time we had met. I complimented him on the many pieces of his which I had read with pleasure over the years. Many of these had dealt with his favorite issue and perhaps on occasion mine as well, the fate of the Jew in Germany. I offered him tea and a local liqueur, but he chose only the tea. We discussed also his friend David Fürst, who had the chutzpah – I suppose this is a not inappropriate use of that tired phrase – to have taken a coterie of rightwing hotheads under his wing. Only at length did we get down to the business which had brought Nils to me. He had his article and was ready to publish. I read it over while he sipped his tea. The details were correct as far as they went, which is to say, they showed no inkling of the lies of my “war record”; the entire tenor of the piece was rather of the hero of the Nazi-time who had a taken a fall from grace.
Now by this time events had rather mitigated my crime. To protect his own reputation, Herbert Kaminski had reimbursed the reparation fund for whatever shortfall was involved. Because the war was over so quickly, the gas masks themselves still sat in a Berlin warehouse. With currency fluctuations, they had actually increased modestly in value. I had earned the Fund in the neighborhood of five percent by my “speculation in commodities,” and Herbert would be promptly repaid. Nils had discovered these facts, and they appeared in his article, but they did lead me to wonder what kind of scoop this reporter was left with.
Berlin Cantata Page 5