Still, the Games had been good for business. Foreign visitors bought marks at rates set especially low and, for the first time since Friedrich Weisser's beating, the shop made a nice profit.
Sol had avoided seeing the Games but there had been no avoiding the loudspeakers spread throughout the city. The triumphant cry of the predominantly German crowd calling out, "YESSA O-VENS! YESSA O-VENS!" rang in Solomon's ears as he watched the last of the dismantling process taking place at the stadium.
Though personally delighted by Jesse Owens' triumphs, Sol predicted they would bring nothing but trouble. Even a fool could tell that the Führer was livid over the American's victories. The world's cameras and journalists had recorded the festival of color and sound, the long blue banners showing the five Olympic rings, the red banners decorated with swastikas hung from poles fifteen meters high. The world pictured Berlin roped with evergreens and gold. Thanks to Movietone News, they had seen Hitler Youth bands, brown shirts and short pants scrupulously starched, move through Olympia Stadium's arch and onto the dull-red cinder track; they had heard snare drums rattling out marches and loudspeakers playing waltzes and quickstep marches. They had laughed at Hitler's heavy-handed architectural approximation of the grandeur of the Roman Coliseum, his unschooled vision of a new Berlin.
None of it meant anything. The truce was transient, the memories fleeting. Temporary--the operative word of the times.
The Games, the memories, the present--all vaguely moving shadows.
"O-VENS!"
"SIEG HEIL!"
"O-VENS!"
"SIEG HEIL!"
Head pounding, Solomon began the hike home. When his head and chest began to throb so hard that each step took his breath away, he left the Olympic Highway and hurried along the Konigsallee. Pain notwithstanding, he would be home in time for a whispered Shabbat Service around his mother's starched white linen tablecloth and candlesticks--his sister's most recent letter propped against them: Mama's fine, I'm fine, when are you and Miriam coming so that you can be fine, too?
Near the Imperial Palace, he had to stop. The noise that spilled from adjacent alleys and avenues engulfed him. Deafened him. Buffeted him as if it were alive.
Then, reflected in a department store window, he saw the sign that had entered his subconscious and registered its effect on his body before his conscious mind could deal with it: JEWS NOT WELCOME.
Crowds surged around him, smiling and unnoticing. Cars growled and windows leered, tall buildings wavered--and the pain worsened.
He walked on, holding his chest.
Heart attack. Twenty-eight years old, and about to drop dead.
By the time he reached Franzosische Strasse, his chest and throat felt constricted and an icy cold had enveloped him, bringing with it sweat and chills. The sidewalk seemed to roll beneath him, burning his feet.
It's really all gone, Sol thought desperately. The banners, the cheers, the drummers and athletes marching in revue, the doves and balloons and the promises of peace...the journalists, parroting Hitler's proclamation of a Golden Age not only for Germany but for the world.
The city had returned to normal.
A worker in a white painter's smock watched Sol curiously, then picked up a second sign. Expertly splaying out the edges with a yellow bristled brush, he slapped it up:
SHOP HERE! JEWS NOT ADMITTED!
WE GUARANTEE JEWISH FILTH
WON'T DEFILE THIS ESTABLISHMENT
The worker smiled and nodded, his face distorted like an image seen through a fish-eye lens. Sol took off his glasses and rapidly cleaned them. Sweat stung his eyes.
Around him, unconcerned, people moved at their normal pace.
He leaned against a brick wall that proclaimed DEATH TO ALL JEWS. The pain in his chest was a jackhammer. The city's noise roared in his ears like a animal. He made his way laboriously along the wall, sliding a hand along its rough surface. At the end of the wall he sank to his knees, teeth gritted in agony.
A white-haired shopkeeper dressed in the black robes of orthodoxy was taping a Jewish star on his shop window. "You all right?" He stepped away as though Sol were unclean.
"Must get home," Sol mumbled in Yiddish.
The man looked around furtively and then bent over Solomon. "Are you ill?" he asked anxiously. "In trouble? Get inside, man. Our enemies are everywhere."
Sol struggled to his feet. He stared at the Mogen David the man had pasted on the window; the Star of David bulged and receded as he struggled for breath and tried to focus.
"Why?" He pointed at it.
"Orders. They say they'll leave us in peace if we announce our heritage. So what if Gentiles don't buy from us, at least we'll keep our businesses."
"You believe that!"
"Please, be quiet!" Gathering his scissors and roll of tape, the shopkeeper withdrew into his store like a snail into its shell. When the door shut with a click, the city noise again became a carnivore--some ancient god escaped from back alleys.
Suddenly Solomon knew it for what it was.
Half running, half staggering, he reeled down the street, away from the beast of oncoming riot. His breaths came in gasps. His chest felt white-hot with pain. Auto horns roared in warning and people hurried, looking fearful as they made a path for a madman.
Father! Miriam!
Half an hour later Sol burst into the shop and slammed the door, its bell jangling. Clutching the accouterment cabinet, dripping sweat onto its glass, he fought for breath. His father was in the alcove of the basement stairs, holding the open curtain in his hand. He did not turn around.
"Make a star!" Sol cried. "Put it in the window. They're coming now! In the daylight! I can feel it!"
"What use is there in doing anything--now," Jacob muttered.
"I met another shopkeeper. He was--"
"Only two people besides our family knew that combination." Jacob's voice was low and hoarse. With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the open safe set in the alcove wall. It was empty.
Half a minute passed before Sol realized that they had been robbed and that he knew who had done it. Looking toward the ceiling friezes, he made a sound that was a mix of sobbing and laughter. "Should I summon the Weissers?" he asked sarcastically. "They really should be told."
Jacob wheeled around, his face contorted by fury. "Has my son learned so little? You won't find the Weissers home today. They've abandoned us! Taken what they could, sent away and squirreled away what they could, and abandoned us!"
Solomon heard a new sound inside his head. The wailing cry of a mourner. "I knew it!" he said. "I knew our families should have sat down together months ago and divided everything! One pfenning for you, one for us. One for you--"
"Stop it!"
"The Weissers could have had this case." Sol slapped the one that held the accouterments. "They would have liked that, don't you think? We could have had the one with the pipes. They could have taken the cigars, we the cigarettes. We would get Recha, they would get--"
Jacob raised his hand. "I said stop!" As if involuntarily, his hand continued its motion and he slapped Solomon across the cheek. He was staring, horrified, at his hand when Miriam dashed into the shop.
"Sol! I went upstairs to borrow some yeast from the Weissers. Their door is open and they're not home. I'm worried. There's some kind of commotion down near Leipzigerplatz. I heard someone say it's another food riot." She paused for breath and seemed to notice for the first time that something was amiss.
"I slapped my son, and for what?" Jacob said to no one in particular. "May God forgive me."
"It's not a food riot, Miriam." Sol put his hand on his father's should, his other on his cheek. "It's all right, Papa," he whispered. His chest still hurt, but it was a new hurt, one of loss more than of fear. Much more was gone than the four years' meager profits they had not dared place in the bank to be confiscated. So much more. The Weissers had been like second parents to him and Recha. Jacob and Friedrich had worked together for decades; Jacob gave Fr
iedrich not only a start but a career.
What fundamental madness could cause this? The Nazis? Friedrich's beating? The Depression? All too simplistic.
Father and son looked at one another in terror as shouts and gunshots and sirens echoed from all directions. Then they watched from the door as a phalanx of Nazis moved toward them, striding up Friedrich Ebert Strasse with pistols and clubs and the trophies of rampage. A ruddy-faced Goliath, a swastika armband on one sleeve, a Red Cross armband on the other, marched at the apex of the mob. Whenever he signaled to the men and boys behind him, five or six would break off and enter shops. Sol could hear screams and shrieked prayers rise above the sounds of carnage.
"We must get a star up, Papa!" He scrambled for tape and scissors among the low drawers of the accouterment case.
Arms crossed, Miriam stood on the sidewalk, tears marking her cheeks. "They're destroying everything...all that is or might be Jewish."
"Even where there are stars?" Jacob held his glasses slightly away from his face in an effort to see farther.
"Everything."
"It is the end." He stumbled back inside the shop. There was about him the look of a man hollowed by despair. His face was utterly without emotion and his shoulders sagged as though time itself had bent and then broken his back. "I've seen the beginning of the end. Now I shall see the end. We have all become children of darkness."
He walked in a daze toward the alcove and, after wiping his glasses with his Reichsbanner handkerchief and replacing them on his nose, stood staring at the safe. In a monotone, he said, "The basement. Into the cellar, children."
"They'll come there to ransack the inventory," Sol said.
Jacob dug in a drawer and held up a hammer. "Perhaps, but you will be in the sewer."
The hair on the back of Sol's neck bristled. Some inner sense told him that the chest pains he had experienced had as much to do with whatever lay in the cellar as it did with the terror outside. Numb, he followed his father and Miriam downstairs--toward what? he wondered. His boyhood nightmares?
"We'll never break the weld in time, Papa."
"What choice do we have but to try?" Jacob searched along a top shelf and located the boys' crowbar. Miriam held it against the weld while Solomon, using it like a chisel, bashed against its neck with the hammer. Jacob stood guard at the steps, listening between the ringing of metal against metal.
"I think they're at the apartments! Hurry, my son!"
Solomon did not waste time replying. Ceasing to worry about the possibility of missing the crowbar neck and hitting Miriam's hands, he smashed down again and again with all his strength. Sparks flew, some scattering across the limestone before dissipating. Like glowworms, he thought, sweat running in rivulets down his temples and face. Fireflies come to dance on the dead.
"They're outside the shop, Solomon! Faster!"
The weld peeled apart in metal curlicues. Miriam's eyes were filled with fear, but she kept the bar steady, her whitened knuckles as strained as leather about to be pierced by an awl.
From above came laughter, then the sound of splintering glass.
"Break it, Solomon!" Jacob said hoarsely. "Break it now!"
There was the thumping of boots. Shouted orders. More laughter. The thud of a display case crashing to the floor.
"It won't break, Papa! There's not enough time."
"Baruch ato adonai," Jacob prayed. He added a prayer of his own. "May you grant my son the strength of Samson and the wisdom of the king whose name he bears."
Sol jammed the crowbar into the weld and, with Miriam's help, pried down. His muscles screamed and he could feel his veins, enlarged and pulsing in his neck and forehead.
Jacob hurried over and together they pushed down.
The weld gave with a crack. The grate faltered and slid sideways in its rim, and Sol thrust the crowbar back under the lip.
"If Erich's among them, he'll know we're in the sewer," Miriam said.
"If Erich's among them," Sol grunted as he used the crowbar to raise the grate enough to grip it with his fingertips, "then life's not worth living anyway."
The grate creaked and fell back against the wall.
"Go!" Jacob said. "Go!"
Sol lowered himself into the hole, found the two by four and dropped the final meter, landing on the rotted, dismantled packing crates. Jumping to his feet, he took hold of Miriam's legs as she lowered herself. They fell back together, and he heard her stifle a startled laugh.
"Your turn next, Papa."
On hands and knees, Jacob Freund looked down into the sewer, surveying its bracken walls in what little light the drain hole allowed. "A man of my years should leap down into such a nether world?" His tone was oddly flippant. "And who would shut the grate? Are we acrobats who can stand on one another's shoulders?"
"There's a board here, Papa!" Sol started to climb up.
The grate clanged down.
"Papa? What're you doing!"
Fingers through the grating, Jacob Freund looked down with kindly, gray, bespectacled eyes that revealed an acceptance of the world's cruelty. "This we do my way, children." He was whispering, yet his voice seemed to fill the sewer. "First I'm going to cover the grate with empty boxes, then I intend to go upstairs and offer those...those...offer them cigars to commemorate their victory over the helpless."
"But Herr Freund--" Miriam peered up into the drain. "Please, Papa! All of us, or none!"
Sol struggled to open the grate again but could not lift it; his father held it down. Even through the small slats, he could see the slight, wry smile on his father's lips.
"I came through the Great War with but a broken nose and an outbreak of cynicism," Jacob said. "I wish to do battle again. Alone. That is my right as head of this family. Now hush, both of you. Let a not-so-young man have his way."
"Papa...I love you."
"And I love you, Solomon Isaac Freund. No man could have asked for a finer son." He moved away from the grate. Moments later, just as Solomon jumped down from the board and shook his head in bewilderment, Jacob's face was above them once again. Poking his glasses between the slats, he let them drop. Solomon, catching them, looked up in confusion. "If I should die, make sure I'm buried wearing my spectacles," his father said. "I wish to see the face of our enemy when I point him out to God."
He looked at Solomon and Miriam and muttered, in Hebrew, "May God provide." He placed the boxes over the grate.
CHAPTER FORTY
Residuals of light danced before Solomon's eyes as he tried to accustom himself to the darkness. Clinging to Miriam, he listened to his father ascend the steps.
"Maybe the Nazis won't hurt him when they see that he's old and half blind," Miriam said.
She sounded unconvinced. Knowing words would only betray his own despair, Sol remained silent. Blackness reigned. It swirled around him, enveloping him in its shroud. The plook...plook of dripping water resounded through the sewer, and he thought he heard the scuttling of rats.
The place was colder than he remembered. He welcomed Miriam's embrace as much for its warmth as for its comfort. He tried to concentrate, to control his ragged breathing as the shortness of breath that had seized him on the streets returned to deflate his lungs. Pain settled on his chest like a great weight, but this was no heart attack...he knew that now. A sense of such foreboding filled him that he was sure Miriam must feel it too.
He let go of her and stared into the darkness. Waiting for the laughter, the voices, the images.
"I can hear them up there," Miriam whispered. "Why don't they leave!"
As if in answer to her words, the laughter came, rippling through the sewer.
"No! Go away!" Sol shouted.
"Be quiet, Solomon." Miriam placed a hand over Sol's mouth. "What is it? Are you in pain?" She removed her hand.
He shook her off, fighting the explosion of light in his head.
Miriam gripped his shoulder. "Don't let go of me again, Sol. I'm afraid."
"Me too." Th
ey embraced. Upstairs, there was faint scuffling. He could barely hear it above the pounding of his heart and the ghostly laughter that he knew did not come from the shop. Laughter that stopped when a cobalt-blue glow appeared at the end of the sewer and an image of a young black man began to take shape----
----the black man's skin shines with a blue fire. He is naked except for a small piece of torn blanket that covers his genitals. He sits perfectly still, staring outward, face expressionless. A white man, monocled and wearing a white, blood-stained laboratory smock, moves toward him, scalpel in hand----
"No!" Solomon reached toward the image. "They've come back!" he whispered, transfixed by a second image that materialized at the other end of the sewer.
----a paraffin lamp casts a blue-black shadow across a rude table in the center of one-roomed wooden shack. Snow blows through gaps in the wall-boards. In one corner, a figure huddles close to a brazier's red coals, its smoke veiling the low ceiling--a man in a ragged army overcoat and woolen scarf; frostbite has scabbed and pockmarked his dark, sunken cheeks. His eyes are dull, his hands wrapped in blood-stained gauze. An emaciated woman wrapped in an old blanket, an ancient carbine slung across her back, leans over him. Carefully she unwraps the gauze from one of his hands. The fingers are gangrenous stumps----
I am losing my mind, Solomon thought. The riot, the emptied safe, the degradation--together they had caused him to snap.
A fit of shivering seized him, and with it came a voice.
----Three days now the clouds have held, an old man says. Standing knee-high in snow, he looks toward the sky. A worker next to him grabs hold of a corpse and flops it down as if it is a sandbag. The old man glances at it, then at a row of fresh bodies. The setting sun has cast ribbons of russet and gold out of congealed blood and military uniforms----
"Try to see it," Sol told Miriam, though he knew he was asking the impossible.
"What are you talking about!"
"Look!" He turned her around forcefully. "There! There is another! Can you not hear the music?"
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