by Nir Baram
None of the mourners mentioned that night. ‘What a cursed sickness,’ one of the SD men said. Thomas silently agreed with him; his mother had died of her illness. No one had injured her. Of course the invasion of her house would have terrified her and hastened her death, but, to tell the truth, it also shortened her suffering.
He had not seen Hermann since. Sometimes the question gnawed at him: why had he done it? But, instead of letting it get to him, Thomas started planning how he could retaliate. He remembered that when they sold off Hermann’s father’s possessions or food stolen from hotels, Hermann was embarrassed and would complain about their damned country that forced him to act like a criminal so that his sisters wouldn’t starve. Hermann never concealed his distaste for Thomas’s practice of ‘swindling people’ (though he didn’t turn up his nose at the fruit of the swindles), and the moment came when their friendship began to leach away. That didn’t worry him: lots of boys swore fidelity to one another and got bored after a month. But even if Hermann now saw him as someone who had ‘sold his soul to the Americans’ and nonsense like that, it was still hard to understand the hatred in his eyes or that he had violated a house where he had played as a boy.
One day Thomas decided there was no point in thinking about the kinks in Hermann’s soul. Taking revenge on an SS officer might lead to his own destruction. Perhaps Hermann felt that they were even now and wouldn’t see each other again. But Thomas had to keep an eye out: he wouldn’t let Hermann take him by surprise again, make him stand in the street, trembling, humiliated and ignorant. Next time he would land the first blow.
He was still groggy after washing. Thomas stood in the bathroom and wiped his chest with a damp towel. He hung it up, dressed and went to light the fire. How unfortunate that the ugly Delft tiles around the fireplace had survived Hermann’s visit. He glanced at his watch: in a moment Erika Gelber would ring the doorbell. Since November they had been meeting in the morning at his house. He sat on the new sofa. There was something that he wanted to bring up in their session: since his episode at the New Year’s Eve party, he occasionally lost his sense of time. He would wake up and grope for memories of the previous evening. Was that a symptom of the illness that had attacked him? The doctors told him everything was fine, and to anyone who expressed concern at his appearance, he would say, ‘No, I’m not sick. I’ve had a check-up. Everything’s okay,’ but he was certain that an illness was incubating in his body: dissolving his muscles, trampling on his chest with its heels, tightening the black veils over his eyes.
The doorbell rang at exactly eight thirty. She stood before him with her face reddened by the cold, and, with the demanding casualness typical of her, said she hoped that the fire was lit and that the coffee was steaming the way she liked it.
‘Of course, Frau Gelber,’ he answered, bowing like a servant and leading her into the parlour. She sat in the armchair. He couldn’t lie down here and stare at the ceiling the way he did in her clinic. That would seem affected. So he sprawled on the sofa, leaning on an elbow, and stared at the fire. The shutters were closed, and the flames cast a weak glow. After some small talk, Erika said, ‘We devoted the last two sessions to being an orphan. That’s something we’ve spoken about quite a bit. In 1930, after your father’s death, you came to me with a complaint about frightening attacks that left you feeling weak. Aside from that, as you told me with earnest amusement, you were curious about certain psychoanalytic ideas that had become fashionable.’
‘Let’s be precise, Frau Gelber. I said that it was the fashionableness of those ideas that made me curious.’
‘I stand corrected,’ said Erika, who looked surprised by his petty obstinacy. ‘You must remember that after two years of therapy I told you that your refusal to admit grief was nothing more than stubbornness. You answered—and here I am quoting my notes—“Frau Gelber, I didn’t come to you for lessons in mourning. I give you my word as a gentleman, my father’s death caused me dreadful suffering. But, in all sincerity, right now I’m less bothered by his death than by my own.”’
‘I can’t explain things I don’t remember,’ he stated drily. ‘I also don’t understand what you’re driving at. Whose death troubles you now? My father’s or my mother’s?’
Erika was silent. He detested her silences. Recently he had become convinced that she wasn’t happy with his answers.
‘What kind of woman was your mother?’ she finally asked.
As if she didn’t know, he thought. They’d been discussing her for years. ‘Imagine the proprietor of a superbly furnished and detailed hotel upon which time imposes its decrees. For example: it might be possible to clean the spots on the tablecloths, but you can’t restore their whiteness, can you? All over the hotel, time eats away at its former glory, but the proprietor locks the doors, closes the shutters, sits in her empty office in her pretty dress and waits for the wind to blow it down. Imagine a sailor on the seven seas who hears that his city has changed unrecognisably. He decides not to go back, to remain on the high seas with nothing but his nostalgia for the beautiful days he had at home, now lost.’ He offered as many images as he could conjure up, and sweet warmth crept into him as they multiplied, as if he were sending bright balloons into a dark sky, performing a flamboyant dance against his petrified awareness of loss.
‘Thomas, for several sessions now you’ve only been talking about your mother in metaphors,’ Erika complained. Her voice sounded imploring. ‘And they’re all amazingly similar.’
Her coy tone struck him. He suddenly understood that Erika didn’t say the first thing that came into her head, but replaced it with something different. He felt he could read the shifts in her thinking—a tiny manoeuvre, partially conscious, that might shatter years of trust.
She’s trying to appease me, he thought, prevent me from getting angry. And it had been Erika’s blunt candour that captured his heart when he started seeing her. She always demanded memories of things that had happened and scolded him every time he used the images he liked so much. For a long time he had sensed her weakness, but he still hoped that in their sessions they could ignore the noise of the outside world and keep things the way they used to be. In the past few months he had glimpsed stirrings of a change even in the way her body moved. Her gestures lacked the poise of a person who knows her place.
He was filled with disgust, apologised and rushed to the bathroom. He rinsed his burning face in cold water and considered whether to bring the matter up in the session. The problem was that, if he spoke about it with her now, she would revert to her earlier style in order to appease him. One thing was clear: it would never again be the way it was. For a long time he had been yearning for the hours they had had together, years ago: for the mournful light of the setting sun, lengthening the shadows of the cacti on the shelf; for her too-colourful dresses, all of them suspended on hangers in his memory; and for her attentive expression with its calm tolerance even of his worst deceptions.
He was a man who respected restraint, but Erika was the only soul for whom he felt a fondness that he couldn’t restrain. Around her he became childish, inventing affectionate nicknames for her that he only used to her after pretending they had come to him in his dreams. Damn it, for years he had been passing by shop windows and choosing presents for her.
‘Thomas?’
He took a breath and left the bathroom. ‘Sometimes it’s hot here,’ he cheerfully observed.
The session became buried in worthless verbiage. Most of the time he stared at the vase of crocuses that Clarissa had picked in Professor Bernheimer’s abandoned garden.
When it was finished Erika smoothed her trousers and passed her fingers over the carnation on her lapel. He wondered whether he should tell her that in the Foreign Office they made fun of the English ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, calling him ‘the carnation with a man’. In the past few years, inspired by Thomas, she had stopped wearing those old-fashioned, unflattering dresses and decked herself out in a wardrobe that he called ‘more
up-to-date’: straight skirts almost to her ankles, buttoned blouses with sheer fabric and thin mesh, and hip-length jackets.
Erika told him she wanted to talk about something personal, and that of course he should stop her if he felt this would not be proper. He didn’t know whether to stand up—he wanted to stand now, as he did in his office—but in the end he remained on the sofa, leaning on the armrest.
Erika repeated that perhaps the matter was inappropriate.
‘You’ve said that already, Frau Gelber.’
Erika added in a low voice—his comment had apparently weakened her resolve—that the times weren’t appropriate either. Then she asked him directly if he could help her and her husband and their two children obtain visas to another country. Someone had informed on them to the Gestapo, and they were being constantly harassed.
In his heart he thanked her for not mentioning the children’s names; at least she had spared them both that kitsch. She hadn’t specifically mentioned the United States: a vain effort not to show that the idea had occurred to her after hearing his stories about the negotiations with the Bamberburg Bank and Jack Fiske’s connections in the State Department. Maybe he should offer her a job in Italy? A wicked thought poked its head up. If anyone was really capable of making a deal with the German government, it was Federico, the man who had gone to parties with the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano.
‘It’s strange that you’re asking me in particular, Frau Gelber,’ he said. ‘After all, there are psychoanalytic societies in Europe and the United States, and they’re filled with Jews. Can’t they help you?’
Erika recounted in detail the tribulations she had undergone: in the early 1930s therapists in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society wanted to help her emigrate to the United States, but she and her husband chose to remain in Germany. In the past year, when dozens of Jewish analysts from Austria joined the race for visas, she realised that her chances were slipping: the British Psychoanalytic Society refused to sponsor her and she had received no reply from New York. There were rumours that a movement against immigration was spreading among analysts in America, and a handful of friends in other countries, who had made generous efforts on her behalf, had achieved nothing.
‘I understand,’ he nodded. ‘You’re putting me in a delicate situation. We’re talking about an illegal action.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He must have looked like the most sanctimonious person in the world. He was always tempted to make the worst impression possible at the beginning. When he came home from school with a good report, he used to inundate his mother with terrible stories about failures and fights, just so that he could see disappointment crease her forehead and her eyes close as though she wanted to sleep. Then, just as she was about to reproach him, he would pull out his report—indisputable proof that refuted his own testimony. Erika once asked him why he did it, and he answered that it still happened sometimes, for example, he once told Schumacher that Milton had been hired to consult for a euthanasia project. ‘We have to root out the degenerates, don’t we?’
It simply amused him, he explained to her, that people, even your mother, would believe whatever you told them, if you made it sound credible, even if it didn’t fit in with your personality and everything you’d ever done—the dopes would adjust whatever ideas they had about you to accommodate this new information. We are only silhouettes in the minds of others. ‘Don’t be sad. Of course I’ll help you,’ he told Erika, and he rose from the sofa as a sign that the session was over. ‘If I succeed, it’ll be because there’s a law somewhere—or, rather, there is no law, and this fact can be used.’
The next morning he met with Carlson Mailer and Frau Tschammer in the office. They met once a week to discuss their negotiations with the Bamberburg Bank. It was clear that the governmental agencies were committed to the order to remove Jews from the economy. Wohlthat told Thomas that in fact the Bamberburg was the last remaining large Jewish bank not yet transferred to German hands. Before Schacht had been forced to resign as the Minister of Economics, he defended the Jews, but now the office of the Four Year Plan wanted everything resolved.
Frau Tschammer was in daily contact with people at the Dresdener bank. She reported that they were worried, because apparently the Deutsche Bank had already made an offer to the directors of Bamberburg regarding the countries that would take them in. Carlson Mailer, as was his wont recently, stared out into space, and said little.
After the meeting, Thomas went into Carlson’s office and told him about a secret plan that he had been working on: he knew the therapist who was treating Blum, from the Bamberburg bank. ‘She has considerable influence on him,’ he hinted, as though sharing a secret, and it would be a good idea to use her services to coax Blum to move in the right direction. In response Carlson leafed through a colourful magazine. That weak man had lost any desire to do anything, and was now an obstacle, Thomas thought.
‘If it’s a matter of money,’ Carlson rumbled, ‘do what you think best.’
‘It could be that other considerations are involved.’
‘So find some stunt for them, too.’
‘I’d like to talk about the essence of the deal,’ Thomas insisted.
‘We’ve spoken about it enough.’ Carlson lit his pipe and puffed smoke. ‘And with you every bar of soap has some essence.’
Thomas decided not to say another word. It was clear that all Mailer cared about negotiating was the price of a villa in Nice, overlooking the Promenade des Anglais.
Was Mailer contemptuous of him for promoting the Bamberburg deal? Maybe he would respect him more if he also sat in his office like a scarecrow, doing nothing? There was no point in behaving like a child learning for the first time that history is filled with bloodshed and war: the spirit of the time weaves deals like these, the Dresdener Bank was Milton’s largest client, and that was the only important thing.
It was time for Plan B: he telephoned Jack Fiske in New York, presented his initiative and asked if it was possible to add Erika Gelber and her two children to the Bamberburg list.
‘It’s no secret that we at Milton don’t see eye to eye with the German government about the Jews,’ Fiske answered. Thomas was aware of the pause while the man’s tongue licked his upper lip, which was always dry. ‘Listen to this, but keep it to yourself,’ Fiske purred; no one loved revealing secrets more than he did. He regarded it as one of the pleasures of his position, which enabled him to fear no one. ‘One of the Milton partners is a friend of Henry Morgenthau, and Morgenthau told him that President Roosevelt once complained about the number of Jews at Harvard. In the end, thanks to him, they decided to limit the number. Cultured people solve problems wisely.’
‘And in the matter of the Jewish psychoanalyst?’ Thomas focused on the subject.
Fiske, who understood that he might have insulted him, answered cordially. ‘My good fellow, a request made by one of Milton’s most successful partners is sacred for me. But the State Department is under heavy siege. Yesterday I heard from our people in Berlin that their office has received a hundred and sixty thousand visa applications, and in Vienna there are around a hundred thousand—absolute madness! And I also saw a poll that said that more than fifty per cent of Americans think that Jews are avaricious and that Jewish immigration would damage American values. So tell me honestly—I’m very careful about asking for special favours in immigration matters—will a visa for that woman clinch the deal for us?’
Thomas hesitated. He wanted to say that he still had some doubts, but he immediately understood that that would be an amateurish answer. He should have resolved any doubts before speaking with Fiske. ‘In my opinion it could be critical,’ he said, keeping his voice steady.
‘Okay,’ Fiske said, ‘if people from Bamberburg ask us for that Jew, I’ll act on her behalf.’
‘They hinted to me that it would be better if I spoke about this delicate matter on their behalf. Psychoanalysis is a very secret matter,’ Thomas chuckled. He
knew that this lie might cost him his career.
‘Don’t worry, my good fellow,’ Fiske said cordially. ‘It’ll be enough if Blum asks me, and I’ll take the next step.’
The upshot was clear: Fiske wouldn’t do a thing unless Blum spoke to him.
Plan C was pathetic: he met with Schumacher and asked him whether an appeal to the new Office of Jewish Emigration managed by Heidrich could help Erika Gelber.
Schumacher was horrified. ‘Apparently everyone but Thomas Heiselberg has heard the Führer’s warning to Funk to stop exempting Jews from restrictions. Anyway, as a friend, I tell you that your connection with that Jewish therapist of yours has become suspicious. Soon you’ll be identified as a friend of the Jews. Is she really worth that?’
Thomas struggled against the words, ‘Yes, she’s the last person left to me in this world. Except for her, there are only people like you,’ which, for some reason beyond his understanding, he wanted to say aloud.
There was no choice. He would have to manoeuvre Blum so that, first, he asked Erika Gelber to be included in the bank’s list, and, second, he made the Bamberburgs choose the Dresdener’s offer. Those two conditions had to be fulfilled in tandem.
So here was Plan D, which was a desperate measure. There was no reason why Blum should help Erika in particular. Quite likely he had other obligations. And even if Thomas explained to him that the place was reserved for Erika and for her alone, and that no other Jew could be preferred to her, Blum would probably not believe him. He was suspicious of Thomas. One of his acquaintances once told him that Blum had said, as a kind of joke, that Thomas Heiselberg was a talented person, but he was also the best possible proof for Hölderlin’s dictum that there were no people left in Germany, only professions.
Thomas decided that the time had come for a personal gesture towards the Bamberburgs. He convinced Carlson to host a friendly dinner where representatives of all the parties in the deal would sit together. But first he had to explain to Carlson that it was impossible to invite the Jews to one of the restaurants favoured by the Milton people. He felt it was unjust that he was the one who had to explain the country’s laws to Carlson: if he read a newspaper now and then, he would understand everything. He teasingly asked Carlson whether he had heard that in France—where Carlson had finally bought a house—a law against foreigners had recently been passed. ‘Really? Thanks for informing me,’ Carlson answered, but he invited everyone to an ‘American dinner’ in his luxury apartment on Rankstrasse. He defined the event as a ‘gesture of solidarity with the people from the bank who are in trouble’.