by Susan Daitch
The conversations at these dinners were like walking into a library rearranged by a tornado. Feigen’s wife, Trude, talked about recent elections then abruptly described a doctor in Vienna who interpreted people’s dreams, transformed hysterics into docile house pets, metamorphosed monstrous Hydes into merely inquisitive Jekylls, though who these English Hydes and Jekylls might be and what they were doing visiting a doctor in Vienna I don’t know. One of the wives was a real rocket scientist who had studied Chinese explosives and was interested in the possibility of traveling by submarine through the Adriatic and across the Aegean, dodging small islands and coral reefs to eventually reach the shores of Palestine. I suspect her bags were already packed: oxygen tanks, underwater suit, globe-like helmet with grill. I would have been happy to excuse myself and listen to music on one of those radios, but there was no way to politely leave the table for any length of time. The menu, too, was astonishing in its own way. There was often some kind of fried sausage I didn’t want to eat, but Bruno nudged me, and I took a salty forkful. Once there were smoked mussels scattered on a plate inlaid with mother of pearl. Fragrant steam, I only inhaled. Later, silver plates laden with sacher tortes and desserts of cream and crystalline sugar flavored with chocolate and almonds arrived like small palaces placed up and down the table, glowing as if lit from within. After such a meal even these seemed forbidden.
As the year drew on Mrs. Feigen’s smile grew more fixed as she spoke to some of the other women present: wives, students. When a glass fell or even when the telephone rang, she jumped. I didn’t like being seated next to her, watching her knot her napkin into nervous shapes, and always hoped that honor would go to the submarinist or someone else. She asked me too many questions. Where do your parents live? I was in Strasbourg once before I was married, a charming town. I remember the way the houses were so perfectly mirrored in the canals like a reverse city set just under your feet. What do your parents do? How do they feel about your being so far from home? How did you and Bruno meet? Frederik has never had such a dazzling student. I evaded her questions by telling her my parents died a long time ago. The truth is: 1., all of my family is, as far as I know, very much alive and 2., my marriage to Bruno was arranged, an aunt acting as go-between for the two families. We never met first in a café or a park or even in a classroom as people in Berlin do.
Much to my surprise, when the racial laws were enacted Frederik F. Feigen lost his position. Bruno teased me for my naïveté, of course Feigen would be dismissed. What did you think? Then things got worse. How could a man as smart as FFF, a man who knew so many people, not have foreseen how much worse it would get?
Bruno rounded the corner right after the crowds dispersed, at the intersection of Joachim Strasse and Gips Strasse; those streets meet at such an acute angle, you know that corner, he said. I did know that corner in Scheunenviertel. It was here where I found shops, dark little boxes, hidden in courtyards or upstairs where I didn’t have to change my accent or could speak a different language altogether. Here you could find furriers with Siberian connections, silk merchants with family ties to Samarkand, used junk washed up on these shores via Austro-Hungarian channels. Through big double doors lay winding alleys where balconies hung with washing, children ran and screamed, and unemployed men argued and waited, tried to catch your eye, thieves and shysters plotted. How was his day different from mine? I’d stayed inside studying for exams I’d never take, and knew nothing of what was happening outside. Bruno was returning from scouring a flea market in Kreuzberg, looking for old books he could buy and sell. Walking back through Mitte Scheunenviertel he passed the crumbling Schablonen building, gold-colored, lintels decorated with shells, but nothing he went by predicted what he was about to see. The street was littered with broken glass. If the day had been sunny, you would be blinded by thousands of splinters, he said. Bricks had been thrown through shop windows. Wounded by the flying shards, a woman and the owner of one shop, a jeweler, had been yanked bleeding into the street where they were beaten and left by the curb. The woman had been wearing a fur jacket with a collar made of fox heads, but her face was smashed, so damaged, that the animal heads, though stained with human blood were more intact. The man she’d been visiting was stripped naked and hung from a lamppost. Bruno, wafer thin, some of his hair unglued, falling in ribbon-like bands, spoke like a hysteric but brittle and affectless at the same time. Bruno never told anyone about what he saw, no one but me, and I didn’t one hundred percent believe him, even when he described the bare, stained legs of the jeweler and Trude’s eyeless face. What she had been doing on streets her husband would have avoided, no one knew.
About Feigen’s fate there were rumors: he was arrested, or he sold everything he owned, but though he himself may have been allowed to leave, he wouldn’t have been permitted to take anything out of the country. Whether he was in prison or exile, all we knew for certain was that he disappeared. Other people soon moved into the flat in Oranienburgerstrasse. You could tell if you ventured into the courtyard, as we did, and happened to look up into the window. The music room, you could even see from the street, was completely empty. By now Bruno had abandoned his studies and soon, I too, could no longer continue at the university. Another former student of Feigen’s claimed to have seen him enter a shabby building behind the Hackescher Market, but Bruno wanted to believe the man who had helped unearth the Gate of Ishtar (even if he’d only apprenticed as little more than a lowly German-speaking digger) had made his way to Palestine in a submarine with the rocket scientist. People had begun to disappear, and you could hope they parachuted whole into Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Trenton, New Jersey, somewhere, and began transforming themselves to suit new streets, new accents, new clothing, new street maps.
Bruno struck up a friendship with a small-time leonardo who lived in our building. The leonardo made good money, and soon Bruno, always in need of cash, began working for him on the side, forging pages of rare old German books, incunabula, which he undertook with the accuracy of a Talmudic scribe. Our two-room apartment was littered with black-and-white or tinted photographs of the originals and drying pages that he had bent over with quill and colored inks, copying Latin and 14th-century German to the exclusion of everything and everyone, so dense was his concentration. There wasn’t a big market for these things by the time they joined forces, so the leonardo soon branched out into forging marcs. The actual printing was done somewhere else, but plates that were off on one detail or another were brought home from time to time, used as paper weights, then disappeared. Bruno Nieumacher, quiet scholar, learned to be direct, abrasive, a man who took no detours between hunger and putting food in his mouth. No prevaricating, no what ifs, or maybe we shouldn’ts.
I could no longer study law, but pretended not to notice the shingles of drying paper creating rooftops around our kitchen, and then the bedroom was taken over by jars of ink, as he experimented with potential materials. Just when there was no room to move without ducking, the leonardo got put out of business, in other words, he was put in jail. Bruno gathered armloads of fake bank notes and stuffed them into an incinerator. We left in the middle of the night, taking a train from Berlin to Marseilles, abandoning our books and the few possessions we had accumulated as indigent students, packing only a few clothes. I left the winter coat my grandfather had made for me years ago, because he believed we were going to New York, city of palm trees and coconuts, not Berlin which was only more of the same kind of city on almost the same latitude, only much bigger. Why would you go there? But we did, and now we were leaving again. We’re traveling south, Bruno said, you won’t need a winter coat. We locked the door as if we would one day return, though we each knew this would never be. Bruno was more resolute than I was, or seemed to be so, with each muffled footfall down those five flights past the sound of the Ellenbogens’ quintet of violin-playing children, past the police photographer, Baum, who worked all hours and when I ran into him in the courtyard would describe crimes in lurid detail, past the lonely
Lydya Moskcowisc who lost her sons in the last war. She used to ask us to dinner on Friday night, but we always refused. Finally she gave up. Bruno didn’t want anyone to get to know us, it was too dangerous, and he was not, under any circumstances, looking back. His university studies of ancient history— Mesopotamia, Alexander the Great, the sexagesimal numerical system, and Sumerian maps—all evaporated into thin air. He wouldn’t need those books again and shed no tears over their loss. As the last night train pulled out of the Hauptbahnhof, I thought I would always miss snow and frosty nights, hands buried deep into linty pockets. Then, with our identity papers burning holes in our pockets, we were gone.
Once in Marseilles, Bruno began poking around in used bookshops for the odd rarity that might have tumbled into a bin. We were broke. So what else could possibly be new? Bruno had few contacts in France, and he felt we needed anonymity, even more than in our days in Berlin. Picking up his old trade provided a less public channel of employment than applying for a teaching post. He didn’t want to meet new people who would ask him where he came from, invite him to dinner, or say if you came from Berlin you must know Herr X who trains lorikeets to recite Virgil. He needed to work alone. We’d been in the city about a year when poking around a used book shop he spied a short man, black hat perched on the back of his head, prayer fringes visible under his jacket. Never thinking the customer could be his old professor, a fellow who bought his tree well in advance of December 24, Bruno was shocked when the man tapped him on the shoulder, and greeted him by name in whispered, raspy, Berlin-accented German. Yes, it was Feigen, such purple bags under his eyes, face grown so narrow, he was hardly recognizable.
Once across the border it had taken Feigen a long time to recover from enforced penury. He’d changed his name back to the Shuki that had disappeared decades earlier, leaving the Frederik at the German frontier, expanding the F to Fingers, and it was by this middle name he came to be known. Feigen believed war was imminent; people were already racing to sell paintings and other possessions. He put a wet digit in the air, sensed the direction the wind was blowing, and set himself up as a first-rate appraiser of antiquities, also becoming an exceptionally talented black marketeer putting his expertise to good use. Shuki Fingers Feigen became known just as Fingers. It didn’t bother him in the least.
When I met him again it had been several years since our last dinner invitation. Feigen was still the avuncular professor of ancient history, though the sausage and ham dinners were long gone, nor were they replaced by mussel-laden bouillabaisse. Fingers did no business from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, and he went to synagogue with a bunch of local Sephardim for whom he was the picture of an inscrutable easterner, rather than a lost eminence from Berlin. Of the transformation Feigen said, “I’m no longer sending all this mail Return To Sender, but accepting that yes, indeed, I do live at this address. I go to the Maariv service in the evening with displaced Tunisians who hum ancient cancioneros, pop olives into their mouths like pfeiffernusse. I can’t understand a word they’re saying half the time, but so what?” Later, Bruno explained, Doctor FFF with his lecture notes, monogrammed silver, crystal chandeliers made in the Kaiser’s glass-works, and radios beaming broadcasts from the BBC, all that was murdered with Trude.
“Sidonie, Sidonie, my dear.” As Dr. Feigen, he had barely paid any attention to me, but for Fingers, I had my uses. I was enlisted in the service of their schemes.
“Why study law? Soon there will be no laws; there hardly are anymore as it is. Married to Bruno, you’re complicit in his ‘creations’ anyway, so join us, Sidonie. We can use you. Your French is, naturally, better than your German.”
Feigen had lost something of his gold-plated smoothness, his manner, though he could still draw on a wealth of facts about the calendar system of the people who dwelled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers or the importance of decoration in the story of Ishtar and Tamuz. But, even more so than Bruno, he didn’t want to meet anyone, not really, and he didn’t want to kiss the hands of women who reminded him of his wife or men whose foresight was so much keener than his had been, men who got their francs and family on boats and trains well in advance of mobs, their ropes and stones.
So I became their front. My job was to find future refugees and immigrants who didn’t yet realize how foreign they were to become. We helped them liquidate their assets: their Degas, their Cézannes, their whatever, and took, besides our commission, various secret cuts along the way. Fast and cheap. With this in mind I might have found Madame Canonbury before she found us, although my clientele generally lived in houses and possessed leases, titles, deeds, and passports ready to go, but this apparently stateless apparition provided the most priceless thing any of us had ever seen.
Feigen set up his shop in rooms he occupied in a western part of the city, though also not far from the port. We all had our eye on the exit door. His rooms were dark and chaotic, as different as possible from the elegance of the Oranienburgerstrasse flat his wife had ruled. Artifacts, sculptures and statues were scattered everywhere, paintings leaned against walls. Some art books lay stacked around haphazardly. It was into this complex half-warehouse, half-shop that we led the gin soaker, not to fleece her so much as to enlighten ourselves. For all Bruno knew, she was out to rook us, passing an odd twist of bronze off as something ancient and rare. For Feigen it didn’t matter who Madame Canonbury was or had been. She was just a customer, an old woman, come this way, sit down, let’s see what you have. He never took his hat off, this slight fingernail clipping of a man. It was already evening, but he only turned on one floor lamp and unwrapped the phoenix as soon as it was handed to him. Newspapers fell to the floor.
“Do you know what this is?”
Madame Canonbury once again stared up towards the tin ceiling and began to mutter something about a man who promised to send for her. He’d found a vast Persian treasure: bath houses of solid gold, fountains of wine still running, streets paved with diamonds and emeralds. It had all disappeared into the Gulf of Oman when he tried to return to England but there was more, surely, where that came from. She would never live to make the trip, but more artifacts lay in those caves or under the desert just waiting to be found. Fingers left us to consult some book or other and returned wiping the dust from his hands on the sides of his already fairly dirty jacket.
“I’ll offer you ten thousand francs.”
“Come, my friend,” Madame C said in a low nasal voice. She collected her bits and pieces as if to leave, but hers was the kind of violent resentment some people feel when they hit their head against a table edge, enraged at an inanimate object. Anger at Fingers was just as pointless. “Let’s not joke here. The creature’s worth ten million francs. It’s a god, not a jar opener.”
“Then you must find someone who will pay that amount. It’s a copy of the ancient Persian phoenix. Not original, not by any means. Many copies of these were made in Tehran to sell to European visitors during the end of the last century. It has some interest as a curio, but not as an antiquity, no, I’m sorry to say. See this seam here.”
It was hardly a seam, more like a haphazard ridge along the sides of the figure. Feigen was speaking to senses dulled by glasses raised and glasses quickly downed.
“It was a primitive sort of casting, but this isn’t an original piece, no, Madame, sorry to disappoint, but I will pay something for it, just to take the thing off your hands. Victorian travelers brought these phoenixes back from Persia, and they were used as door stoppers or paperweights.” The emerald city swayed, then crumbled into a cloud of green dust. If it really didn’t exist then Feigen was giving accurate information about the value of the thing, but I had no way of knowing which assessment was the true one. Ever the dupe, I believed him. Esme Canonbury looked stunned, as if she’d been socked in the jaw. I felt deeply sorry for her and despised Feigen, though I’d often felt sorry for him as well. Her eyes watered, and she pulled her wraps, her binding tighter around herself. Fingers had a stern, yet plac
id expression on his face.
“In Cairo, before the war, I was attached to the British embassy, but I lost everything. My husband threw me out,” she stuttered. “I was seduced by a story of a lost city and wanted to follow others in its quest. The gangplank had long been drawn up, and HMS Dorchester was disappearing over the horizon. It had a rendezvous with a German submarine that had wandered into the Gulf of Oman, having reversed direction in the Strait of Hormuz. And while torpedoes pierced its hull, I was left marooned on the desert coast with no money, only my camera, and not a soul of my acquaintance within three thousand miles.”
She pulled her veil back over her face, and leaving the phoenix on the table, wandered out the door, heading toward the elevator. I felt miserable for her, and whispered to Bruno, can’t he just pay her whatever she needs? If Fingers was telling the truth, and the creature was only a cheap copy sold to nineteenth-century tourists traveling in Persia, he could still pay her a bit more. If the simurgh was real, then he was playing a cruel trick. I twisted a loose button on the cuff of my jacket until it came off in my palm. Bruno wouldn’t look at me. He cleaned under his fingernails with a matchstick. It was a habit he’d abandoned in Berlin but it had now returned.