Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  Stav turned right and left again, as usual, aware that every step took him deeper into the maze of narrow streets and dark housing blocks, Hinterhöfe, on the wrong side of the river Spree. His own habitat, come to that, though his niche was a humble one. Don’t kill me, Herr Wolf, I’m an unsavory fellow, there’s nothing on these bones worth eating.

  The man reached over and touched Stav’s arm. Gently, almost. The simple gesture brought him to a halt. He returned the man’s gaze, which was focused, intelligent, even respectful. One civilized being to another. “I won’t importune you for long, my good sir,” the man said. “I merely hope we can talk for a little while. Why don’t you let me buy you breakfast? Isn’t there a place just ahead?”

  This was a neighborhood café called the Black Shoe, though no sign marked it as such; the name was known only to locals and was a kind of historical allusion, commemorating a particular customer and a serving of liver and onions. It was the kind of place where you could order a glass of vodka with your Blutwurst and eggs. And it was already crowded at not even six in the morning, with the late shift covered in coal dust and sweat, rubbing shoulders with the early shift still half-drunk from the night before. And now an exhausted cabaret performer, traces of black greasepaint showing around his eyes, and an immaculate gentleman who looked like—in the careful expression people used nowadays—someone from the ministries.

  “You have a remarkable talent,” the man told him, smiling broadly, while they stood at a small raised table waiting for coffee. “I’m sorry, I must properly introduce myself. Kohlwasser is my name. Helmut Kohlwasser.” He held out a hand.

  No title, Stav thought. No ceremonial rank. A puzzlement, but he deemed it worth a handshake.

  “Your talent,” Kohlwasser went on, “would seem to consist in knowing things. Please correct me if I’m mistaken. But in knowing by means that are not at all apparent. That boy, his unfortunate friend—you managed that quite discreetly; it was clear you could have said more but chose to spare his feelings. This sort of fine judgment, this restraint, is not expected at a place like the Trigilaw, is it? Nor in many places, truthfully.” He leaned closer. “I won’t insult you by asking how is it done. But if I may, sir, without causing offense, ask instead: Do you know how it is done? Or does it come as a surprise? To you as to the audience? I confess, sir, this was my impression.”

  Stav, taken off guard, opened his mouth, then closed it again. A haggard waitress left coffee in two small cups. A splotch of liquid, black as oil, had spilled into the saucers.

  Kohlwasser backed off—literally pulled away and sipped thoughtfully at his coffee. His expression betrayed nothing of how he felt about it. Stav thought it tasted terrible.

  “But you know,” the man said, his voice now cheerful, avuncular, “this is what I found so striking. As I believe the General did as well. This mysterious awareness. The information”—snapping his fingers—“just there! No one knows how, not even yourself. And that’s better, isn’t it? Because to know the how, the from where, this would be a distraction. All that matters, all one cares about, is the information itself. The answer coming exactly at the right time. Amazing the audience. Ensuring one’s continued employment. Don’t you agree, my good sir?”

  Stav felt himself nod.

  This cheered Kohlwasser. “Yes, yes, I thought so. And this is why I so much wanted to speak with you. Because you see, it occurs to me—as I’m sure it occurred to the General—that you and I are in very much the same business, we’re paid to perform the same trick. To be aware, by dark and mysterious means. To have the answer to a question at just the moment it’s wanted.” His manner grew animated. “No one cares how! No one cares from where! These things are distractions. The General doesn’t care about those. Nor do those to whom the General must report.”

  Stav got it, finally. The General—he’d let the title pass without thought. Everyone in Berlin had a title, and everyone delighted in proclaiming it. But not Kohlwasser. He’d been using the old-fashioned army term, General, in preference to the clumsy, up-to-date SS terminology when talking about Reinhard Heydrich. Stav waited, feeling sick at the pit of his stomach, for the rest of it. The invitation one could not refuse. Come work for us, give us the answers when we need them. Did you know Reichsführer Himmler is a devotee of the dark sciences? He’ll recognize your great talent for what it is.

  But the pitch never came. Maybe the words were too crude to pass Kohlwasser’s lips. He patted them now with a monogrammed handkerchief, which he then replaced in his breast pocket with the corners showing, like an English film star. Contenting himself, in the end, at their amiable parting under a sooty Kreuzberg sun, with repeating a single motif, this time with a slight variation.

  “Nobody ever needs to know how,” he said, shaking and briefly holding on to Stav’s hand. “Nobody ever needs to know from whom. We don’t care about that. But you understand. You and we—in this respect, we’re really very much alike.”

  LIBRARIANS IN EXILE

  WASHINGTON, DC, AND SILVER SPRING: APRIL 1938

  A crowd was screaming on the radio.

  Oskar winced, an ingrained habit—but the voice shouting over the cheers wasn’t that of a foaming Jew-hater, it was a sportscaster with a southern drawl, enthused beyond all understanding by a great play, a super play, quick thinking there by Buddy Myer at second, that’ll send ’em packing back to Philly.

  Six weeks in America, holed up in a fleabag Leo had found for him—“Just keep quiet, Oskar, they’ll take your cash and ask no questions”—yet still it was strange to him. More than strange, fantastisch, something out of a new kind of fairy tale.

  “You’ll be fine, Oskar,” Leo had told him. “You’re alive—isn’t that enough for you?”

  It was and it wasn’t. He was alive, yes. The hotel, for all its shortcomings, had proved a safe haven, tucked into a dark street north of the train station. Oskar was on friendly terms with the Negro woman who changed his sheets and the one-armed white man who sat after hours at the front desk, studying the Daily Racing Form and perpetually shaking from delirium tremens. In daylight hours he kept to his room, staring out over a railroad switching yard.

  As to “You’ll be fine,” that also was true to an extent. His shoulder still hurt but he could walk now without limping. Erwin Kaspar’s ugly suit had been ruined, but Leo had brought him a set of workmen’s clothes: blue denim pants, a checkered shirt and a secondhand jacket more than adequate for these warm nights. But he was alive, so yes—he was lucky.

  Only it wasn’t enough. He’d failed in his mission. He was out of contact with his superiors and could not think how to get in touch except by walking into the German embassy and, thus, directly into the line of fire of whatever enemies he might have there—a swarming host, he imagined. He’d been betrayed; that much was clear. Perhaps by the two young men from the tavern, perhaps by Toby Lugan, perhaps by some flaw in his cover. That didn’t matter, but this did: he was on the wrong side of the ocean, far from the struggle being waged for the soul of his homeland. Now that his injuries were mended, and the weeks were slipping by, and his money running out, he needed to “get back in the game,” as Leo would say. But what a perplexing game it was—worse than baseball and a good deal rougher.

  He’d tried impressing this on Leo at one of their dinners together, at an establishment called the Dixie Pig. Had such a place existed in Germany, Oskar would have been loath to set foot in it. But Leo breezed through the door and past the glowing jukebox to a booth jammed into a corner, equipped with a lever-action dispenser of paper napkins and a bottle of scarlet pepper sauce, sliding over the grease-stained bench as though he’d been coming here for decades. The place was narrow and noisy, an unseen radio pumped out Tommy Dorsey, “Satan Takes a Holiday,” and the patrons shouted happily above it. A nation of uncouth innocents. Leo, who’d swapped his black suit for a proletarian outfit like Oskar’s, ordered for both of them.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about your situ
ation,” Leo said once the waitress brought their beers and left, “and there are things that make no sense to me. But they have to make sense, there must be something we’re not seeing, because things happened exactly this way, not some other way. You really were sent over here—that’s the first thing. Your masters concocted this stupid plan, so we have to assume they had their reasons.”

  Oskar glanced over his shoulder, though he supposed there was scant likelihood that anyone here understood German, and even less that they could hear over this racket.

  “So I ask myself, What is it that makes these anal-retentive General Staff types so eager to spill national secrets? And to a decadent Western power. Yet the fact remains: they did it.”

  “They want to avoid another war,” Oskar suggested.

  “Maybe they do. Or maybe they just want to avoid the wrong war. But there are other means of doing that, surely. Why don’t they all resign? Go to the Führer and say, Sorry, old boy, if you want this war so badly, get your pal Himmler to fight it for you. I mean, he could scarcely hang the lot of them, could he?”

  “Officers are normally shot,” said Oskar dryly. “Hanging is for the lower ranks.”

  “Duly noted.” Leo rewarded him with a smile. “Shall I tell you what I think?”

  But then the food arrived, something identified as barbecue—the portions huge and odorous, sauce dripping from the edges of sturdy jade-green plates.

  “Anything else for you boys?” the waitress asked, her gaze moving incuriously between them.

  “Two more Nationals,” Leo told her, then glanced at Oskar. “We’ll need them.”

  “You were saying,” Oskar prompted.

  “Try this first. It’s a local specialty. The epitome of Washington cuisine.”

  “What is this meat?”

  “You won’t be able to tell, but I think it’s pork. I know”—an overdone shrug, the Yiddish comedian plying his trade—“a Jew eating pork. But this is America! At least it’s one America.

  After a few bites Oskar was blinking through tears, gulping mouthfuls of bad but very cold beer.

  “Wonderful, isn’t it? And cheap, too. They must breed pigs here like rabbits. No, Oskar. There can be only one explanation. They’re lining up allies. They think if they show the world what Hitler’s really up to, they’ll have backing from abroad when they make their move.”

  What move, Oskar wanted to know, but his throat seemed to have locked down. He feared the reception of this food in his intestines.

  Leo nodded, apparently taking his expression for a sign of understanding. “You see it, don’t you? Your masters are planning a coup.”

  Oskar managed to swallow. “A coup? No, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense. I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot.”

  “I can see you have. But listen, Leo. Coup or no coup—I need to get back over there. You’ve got to help me.”

  Leo shook his head. “They’ll only kill you.”

  “You told me that before.”

  “Did I? Well, at least you listened.” Leo regarded him shrewdly for a long moment. “A soldier’s place is at the front—is that it?”

  “Well, of course there’s that. But suppose what you say is true—then they’ll just keep trying. They’ll send another messenger. So it’s important I get back and tell them what happened—so maybe they can figure out where it went wrong. As it stands, all they know is that I’ve vanished. I might be dead, I might’ve defected. I could even be under interrogation by the FBI. I’m serious, Leo. You must know somebody. Don’t the Socialists have some kind of underground?”

  Leo shrugged like the innocent man he was not. “How would I know?” he said, in the voice of someone who knew very well indeed.

  —

  Promptly at eight o’clock on the night of the next baseball game—a home-team triumph, Oskar heard later, Washington beating Philadelphia nine runs to two—Leo came to fetch him in a taxi. Oskar enjoyed cab rides in America, since the drivers were never in a hurry and there was often good music on the radio.

  “Where are we going?” he asked as the cab pulled away.

  “Silver Spring,” Leo said, to the driver as much as Oskar. “A little after-dinner soirée. Cheese and brandy, cigars for the gentlemen—you know how it goes.”

  Oskar hoped he was kidding. He had only these clothes, and they were hardly proper for an evening out. Leo was in his black suit again. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now, so he settled back into the generous American upholstery and watched New York Avenue flash by.

  His attention was briefly caught by a new streamlined building in the Bauhaus style announcing itself as THE HECHT CO. in lighted vertical lettering. Something you’d see in Germany. Even a German name. Jewish German, probably. Despised immigrants who’d brought a little of the Fatherland with them, if only by way of their surnames and their taste in architecture. Ironic, really—Jews wearing their Germanness so proudly. Though of course they were right to be proud. The land of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers. And lately of stormtroopers, snitches, “mercy killers.” Where every boy dreams, as Oskar had, of growing up to be a soldier.

  The city turned to woodland—Rock Creek Park again, wider and greener up here—and then to a comfortable suburb with tidy bungalows, a modest town center, more modernist architecture, a movie house showing Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. Leo read an address from a piece of paper and the cab maneuvered though neighborhood streets, stopping at last before a small house that wouldn’t have been out of place in Saxony: pitched roof, mullioned windows, half-timbered façade.

  The front door swung open at their first, tentative knock, and a round-faced, eager-looking man beckoned them to enter.

  “I’m Gregor,” he told them, speaking the German of the north, Schleswig-Holstein, a hint of Scandinavia behind it. “Please, come in, we’ve just opened a bottle of Riesling. You are Herr Gandelmann, yes? With whom I spoke on the telephone? And so this must be Leutnant Langweil.”

  Oskar was startled to hear his own name spoken aloud. He’d left his real identity so far behind that now it hardly seemed to fit him anymore. Gregor led them down a hall to an informal sitting room where a young couple waited, expecting them—or, at second glance, maybe not a couple, just a man and a woman who happened to be sharing the sofa.

  Introductions all around. The young man was Stefan Sinclair—the second name a gift of his American father, who’d left his mother years ago but not before bestowing upon Stefan the gift of dual citizenship. The woman was Lena Hamel, red-haired and striking, a touch of the wild East in her cheekbones. Both looked slightly older than Oskar, about Leo’s age, in the mid-twenties somewhere. Their stories intertwined, and they told them simultaneously over glasses of wine, interrupting each other and apologizing, then laughing, everyone settling down as the atmosphere changed to something these people must have grown familiar with over here—Germans in a room together, enjoying their native tongue.

  “We worked in the library at Weimar,” Lena told him. “The grand old library, a marvelous building. The light in the reading room—people would come and sit there, maybe with a newspaper but not really reading, just to be in that wonderful light. I worked at the main desk—”

  “I was in Literature.” Stefan spoke over her. His voice had a bitter edge. “Not a bad collection. Particularly strong in the older texts. Many fine original editions, quite rare in some cases. We had a separate room for these; one needed special permission—”

  “You saw every kind of person there. Old people, boys from Gymnasium, mothers with their children—”

  “Jews,” said Stefan pointedly. “It didn’t matter—we welcomed everyone.”

  Politely Oskar said, “Yes, that’s very good.” He thought he shouldn’t be feeling so impatient, and yet he was.

  Stefan shrugged. “Very good, yes. It was a place of knowledge, a public treasure—we worked hard to make it so. We were professionals, you understand?
Professionals doing our job. We were not political.”

  “Some of us,” Lena said gently, not quite contradicting him, “a few of us were political. I was a Social Democrat. A matter of personal conviction. I went to meetings but only in my free time, in the evenings. I spoke about such things only to my friends. At work I kept my opinions to myself. It’s what I’d always wanted, this work. What I’d studied for.”

  “Of course, they didn’t care about that,” said Stefan. “The Nazis don’t care about studying, really. It’s too tedious for them, too time-consuming. ‘Germany cannot move slowly at the present time!’ ”

  Oskar recognized this as a quotation and was happy to be able to place it. “Stefan George.”

  “Yes!” Lena said, slightly rolling her eyes, flashing Oskar a brief, mischievous smile. “These troublesome nationalist poets. Quite a demand we had for them, right along. People always asking, the same names over and over. You felt like saying, Look, there are hundreds—”

  “George isn’t that kind of nationalist,” Stefan said crossly. “Not if you actually read him. Of course, the Nazis aren’t interested in reading, either. Has anyone actually read Mein Kampf? I mean, for the love of God—”

  “I did,” said Oskar. “It was—well, it was terrible, but I read it. We were required to.”

  Stefan smirked. “So you’re the one. But George, anyway, turned down the honor of being the Reich’s first poet laureate. Did you know that?” He looked at Lena, a challenge. “He sent a member of his circle—a Jew, in fact—to give Dr. Goebbels his regrets. And then he died.”

  “I guess that showed them,” she tittered.

  “Why’d you leave?” said Leo. “Did you get in trouble?”

  Stefan and Lena exchanged glances. “Not trouble, exactly,” she said. “It never quite came to that. But there was tension. Always there was a struggle, confusing directives: first this author can stay on the shelf but not that one, then it changes and that one must go, too. And nothing ever gets put back. Once it’s gone, it never existed. Heine goes but Mendel stays, because Mendel’s a scientist, and you know, science is science, it doesn’t care who your father is. But then Mendel becomes a Jewish scientist, in other words no scientist at all, and definitely no German, so that’s it for him.”