by Robert Klein
“I am from Munich, I am sorry, but I do not know him,” she answered patiently.
“I figured since Germany was a small country, you might know him.” At the utter stupidity of his question, it occurred to me that the guy was trying to make time with my girl. It seemed an eternity while the cretin went on and on about his family in Germany. Finally, he moved on, and it was my turn at the information desk. I broached the subject of the concert, and Elizabeth replied that she had to work on the evening in question. She muttered something to herself in German that did not contain the only German words I knew, “sauerkraut” and “schweinhund,” which left me very much in the dark. Suddenly, she said: “Maybe with me Inge will make the exchange.” She darted back into the office for ten seconds and came out smiling. “Yes, Robert, I will come. It will be wonderful.”
Inge came out and said, “She will have a good time, no? A better time than she has here. You will both think of me when you have a good time, no?” Good old Inge.
On the appointed evening, I insisted on picking up Litzabet (the German pronunciation) at the Lefrak City apartment she shared with the three other women. Elizabeth suggested that I come up and see the apartment. Walking down the hall, I noticed that almost every door had a mezuzah on it, indicating to my amusement that the four fräuleins from Berlin were living in a very Jewish neighborhood.
Elizabeth greeted me with a European double-cheek kiss, leaving me with my hand extended, and led me into the living room, decorated with rented Danish modern furniture and abstract reproductions. It was a four-bedroom apartment that the Berlin Chamber of Commerce had rented for the duration of the fair.
On cue, Goetje and Helge came out of their respective rooms to say hello. It was a novelty to see three of the girls (Inge was holding the fort at Checkpoint Charlie) in something other than their uniforms. Goetje was even in a bathrobe, looking no less gorgeous for it, and Helge wore pin curlers and gaily showed me around the place. Next to each bed were picture postcards and family photos, including old German faces, and I wondered if the ancestors of these adorable and perfectly agreeable young women had been tormentors of my kinsmen.
Elizabeth looked radiant, in a bright summer dress that highlighted her dramatic blue eyes and apparently beautiful breasts.
On the way into Manhattan in my Ford Galaxie, I pointed out every landmark like an expert tour guide. After a life of Volkswagen Beetles, Elizabeth couldn’t believe how big my car was. The skyline was glimmering, looking its absolute best in the late dusk, and I had a story for every building and point of interest. It was my city, the city of my birth, the city that I loved, and seated next to my foreign companion, I waxed rapturous and romantic. If the guys could only see me now, with a beautiful, bright German woman who loved Bach. If my parents could only see me now, going to a church with the daughter of a Nazi.
As a matter of fact, some of my friends would meet her shortly, several of them having planned to attend the concert. Twenty minutes later, there they were, in front of the entrance steps on Park Avenue: Roland Rofkin and the fraternal twins Fred and Frank Casden, the heaviest into Bach of the guys in our group. I was suddenly aware of their Beatnik, long-haired, whiskered counterculture look, to which my schoene matjen paid no attention, greeting them warmly. Roland, the bearded Marxist and linguistic dilettante, began conversing in German with her about his sojourns in her native land. As we entered the ornate Episcopal church and sat down, the twins gave me the high sign of approval behind her back from the next pew. We were psyched and ready as the small orchestra and solo trumpet opened the exquisite Cantata #147, “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben,” joined by an excellent chorus. There is something so beautiful about the first ethereal sound of music cutting through the silence that precedes it, the acoustics of the impressive church enhancing it all.
Elizabeth seemed to be excited and thoroughly involved in the spirit of the moment; taking my hand in hers, she squeezed it twice, sending an express train of nerve impulses directly to the synapses of every inch of my body, penis not excluded. This was decidedly different from the handshakes we had exchanged up to now, and after a few moments, as if on cue, we looked at each other simultaneously. Though she was smiling, I could see glistening tears in her eyes, but good tears, if you know what I mean. I could feel a lightness in my chest and shoulders and a sense of well-being and fulfillment. Forgive the cliché, but my heart was soaring. I was in exactly the place I wanted to be, with exactly the person I wanted to be there, accompanied by as magnificent a musical score as has ever been created. I felt then that this was one of the greatest moments of my life, and I still feel that today as I write this and hear the music in my mind, a gorgeous melange of trumpet and violins and rousing human voices. There were a couple of motets and a solo harpsichord piece and the performance was over all too soon.
I feared that the magical mood—more precisely, the spell—would end. After a long round of applause from the aficionados assembled, and the well-deserved bows of the singers and musicians, people from the church passed around large donation plates. My euphoric appreciation drew a twenty-dollar bill out of me—after all, singers and musicians, my fellow artists, had performed mightily and must eat. Of course, the Communists behind me sneered contemptuously at the plates. Their point of view on the matter was entirely different; they extolled the virtues of the arts and appreciated the creative talent, but they insisted that the proletariat was entitled to enjoy such talent free of charge; anyway, they wouldn’t give money to the opiate of the masses.
With the music still in our heads, Elizabeth and I made our way past the oak pews and elaborate stained-glass windows out to Park Avenue, holding hands tightly, suspended, silent.
The boys were thrilled and loquacious about the music. “Did you believe that singer? She was off the wall,” Frank said. Roland shook his head. “Beyond belief,” he said, “beyond all possible human concept of belief.” Fred, ever fidgety, rubbed his fingers together nervously, which he did when upset or ecstatic.
I was about to say goodbye and go for the car when Roland suggested that we all get something to eat. I hadn’t planned for that eventuality, and I looked to Elizabeth, who instantly acceded. We walked over to Lexington, it being an impossibility to get a cup of coffee on Park Avenue between Forty-second Street and Harlem. Elizabeth and I found ourselves swinging our joined hands in the rhythm of happy children. We found a coffee shop, and as the boys went in, Elizabeth pulled me to her on the sidewalk and looked into my eyes. “Robert, I want to thank you with my heart for this beautiful experience,” she said sweetly. Suddenly, I felt like I might bust if I didn’t kiss her right there in front of the coffee shop on Lexington Avenue and she didn’t kiss me back. I did and she did and if that wasn’t Gene Kelly and MGM I was in the middle of, then I don’t know what is. A long kiss it was.
While sipping her tea and pecking at her bread and butter (who but a European would order bread and butter?), Elizabeth squeezed my hand under the table as we all recounted our impressions of the divine concert. Then, as was inevitable with these guys, politics came up, and I became apprehensive, knowing the tenacity and depth of commitment these boys had to their fucking socialist revolution and the peaceful overthrow of the United States government. The usual suspects—fascism, imperialism, proletariat, workers, exploitation, et al, rained over the table like a cannonade of howitzers, yet a good-humored Fräulein Schmidt withstood the barrage and the test of fire. I felt a certain pride as she charmed them and parried their ideology at the same time. It so happened that she lived in a country that was divided by electronic fences and machine guns. These middle-class City College Trotskyites seemed oblivious to the pragmatic side of the issue, the fact that this woman risked death to visit relatives in the eastern sector of her own country. Yet she was gracious and cheerful in the debate. The boys talked glibly at the safe distance of student theorists and intellectuals. She countered patiently, without bitterness, with first-person accounts of the difficult exper
iences of the individual who must live in the actual world these theories helped create. While she showed some pride in the strides taken by West Germany, she made it a constant point that Germany’s behavior during the Nazi era was cause for shame and retribution by the Allies, and that Germany must prove it had a place again in the civilized postwar world. This was good news to the four Jews assembled, though none of us took her for a Nazi. The real beauty of her affable behavior was her forbearance in a social situation that would be considered difficult by any objective person: the first encounter with my friends.
In the next several weeks, Elizabeth and I saw a good deal of each other, with much fervent hugging and long, sensuous kisses and, fairly soon, much more. She took to calling me endearing German names like Herzilein and Robertzien, who was a lovable character from German children’s books. She enjoyed pushing my hair from my eyes to a place behind my ear, and kissing me on the nose in public. I took great pleasure in everything, including no longer having to steal furtive moments at the Berlin pavilion and hide behind displays from a possible war criminal.
I had little money to spend, which did not faze Elizabeth in the least. We went to movies; she loved the Peter Sellers British comedies, as I did, and she adored the Marx Brothers at first sight—the pseudo-political farce Duck Soup hooked her. She was crazy about Chaplin, though it was taking a little longer to break her in to Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields, given the splendid stupidity in the one and the wry American subtlety in the other. We both liked the Supremes and the Beatles; in fact, “Baby Love” was her favorite pop tune, and she sang it in a southern German Munich twang.
We saw the sights of Manhattan arm in arm: the Empire State Building, the Circle Line, and the banjo pickers at Gerdes Folk City. Also included was some of my favorite Gotham esoteria, like the New-York Historical Society and the fabulous Cloisters monastery, scene of my recent triumph as a spear carrier and slaughterer of innocents. My tour-guide commentary, frequently so annoying to my friends—“Did you know that Aaron Burr had a farm on what is now the Upper West Side?”—pleased her immensely. We were so happy, we must have looked like a fashion ad in the Sunday Times.
She became a regular visitor to my minuscule pad on 153rd Street, where we held endless conversations. I had been in love with Judy in college, and I had felt deeply then, more than I had ever felt before. But I was older now, and out in the world, and those same feelings were surging through me once again. I felt excited and scared, awed by the power of my emotion; alternating with a blissful confidence, optimism, and pride.
The Bach played on and on whenever we were together, which was more and more. I loved making love while looking into her eyes to the accompaniment of the music: coitus and cunnilingus to cantatas, fellatio to fugues. Beyond satisfied, yet no desire to part our bodies, and hungry for an encore in twenty minutes. We did it tenderly and lovingly slow, and we did it fast and hot, and we did it every chance we got.
Leaving well enough alone has never been one of my strong points, so ever present in my mind was the anomaly of her being German and I being a Jew from the Bronx. I thought of my parents’ reaction to the relationship; there could be extremely rough sailing with my father. At the same time, I began to realize that this facet of Elizabeth, rather than a detriment, was powerfully attractive to me. In the shallower sense, it was a refreshing departure from my previous female companionship. In this difference I saw something deeper, even ennobling. It was a case of seeing the humanity of the enemy, of seeing and judging an individual on her own merits and not by ancestral baggage. But dammit, she was not the enemy. She had been an innocent baby during the war and the holocaust, and the sins of the fathers and the fatherland should not be blamed on the children, yet—those fucking Nazi bastards. How could they be close kin to a kind, considerate woman with such empathy and longing in her eyes?
We spent our nights together on my single bed, hardly big enough for one adult, and after ardent lovemaking, we would fall asleep entwined in each other’s arms and often wake up that way. I, the fitful sleeper who needed space to toss and turn, slept softly and, after the first few nights, had nary a dream of gassing and death. There was a prevalent cliché at that time, long before Betty Friedan, that European women “knew how to take care of a man.” Elizabeth, while no cliché, seemed to confirm this idea by insisting on cutting my nails, scrubbing me in the bathtub, and massaging my feet, which took a little getting used to.
She disdained only one aspect of my lifestyle—the smoking of cannabis sativa, which frightened and alarmed her. She had seen drug addicts in Hong Kong and France, she explained, and the fact that pot and heroin were at opposite ends of a wide spectrum did not dissuade her. “Robert, don’t take that poison into you,” she would say, truly concerned, even angry. It got to the point that I desisted from smoking the weed in her presence to placate her, sneaking an occasional toke in the bathroom. Still hiding from German authority? One evening she discovered me and became very upset, but she did not rebuke me. Instead, she began to weep. I thought she was mourning my downfall, but this was not the case. “Oh, my dear Robert. My dear dear man. This is your house, and I am interfering with your life and what you do, and I am so ashamed of having been discourteous,” she said through some profound weeping.
I took her in my arms. “No, not at all. Please don’t feel that way. I want you to feel at home here. You’re welcome here,” I insisted.
“No, my Herzilein, I do not have the right to intrude. It is difficult for me to feel at home . . . anywhere. I have worked so much all over that I have seldom been home. I do not even have a home; even in my mother’s house in Munich, I do not feel at home, as you say. It is not my house, and my mother reminds me of this with her behavior. She is not warm; I think sometimes she would rather not see me at all.” She stopped crying, though her eyes were glistening and red. “Remember, Robert, you told me about how when you were sick your mother would, how do you say, pamper you? Bring you chicken soup, make you comfortable? I was in Munich for three weeks before coming to New York. My mother had not seen me for nearly a year. I had caught a terrible flu in Hong Kong and was sick for a week in my mother’s house. She gave me no special treatment, no chicken soup, no hot tea. Barely a hug, a kind word, from one’s own mother. Can you imagine?”
In the course of our conversations about family and childhood, we each produced photos of our parents. I showed a wrinkled picture from my wallet of Ben and Frieda Klein, taken at my bar mitzvah. She showed a picture of her mother and sisters, who looked not a whit like her. Then she presented a snapshot of her father, Captain Schmidt, taken on the eastern front shortly before his death from Russian shrapnel. The picture shocked me once again into the realization that we were descended from disparate stock indeed. Captain Schmidt had Aryan good looks, an ornate uniform, and an arrogant, determined pose. The most disconcerting thing was that he looked like Elizabeth incarnate, though she hardly knew the man, since he died before her third birthday. Elizabeth told me that her striking resemblance to him was a huge emotional issue for her less than affectionate mother, for whom it was a painful reminder of happiness and future lost. The mother favored the other two daughters, who had more of her own temperament and looks.
It was an emotional issue for me, too, though I did not reveal immediately to what extent the picture was so disturbing. Our relationship was already groundbreaking for me, an inexperienced provincial boy, and all too captive of well-founded prejudices. It was an exercise in acrobatics without a net, and I felt that I was growing up in a hurry. “Your father was a very handsome man,” I offered, visions of documentary holocaust footage dancing in my head. “It’s hard for me to imagine him being your flesh and blood. I’m so conditioned to hating that uniform and what it stands for. Is it hurtful for you to hear that?”
“No, Robert, I don’t wonder that you have this feeling. But he also had no choice in the matter. He had to be a soldier.”
He vas obeyink awdahs, I thought. Then again,
what the hell was I so shocked about, anyway? Every man the age of Elizabeth’s father in World War II Germany would have had to serve in the military. What did I expect him to be wearing, a yarmulke with sideburns? I looked from my sweet Elizabeth to the Nazi officer and back again—that darling, gorgeous, passionate Elizabeth who had not a discernible trace of prejudice. I looked again at her father. “He might have killed me if I had been alive,” I laughed, trying to break the tension I alone had created. She took my face in her hands and tenderly looked into my eyes. I looked right back, into those blue eyes, those incredible, sincere blue eyes. I was so unfamiliar with women who had blue eyes.
“Ach, my Robert, my Robertzien, my darling. What a tragedy that would have been, for you to be killed. I never would have met my Herzilein.” She kissed me, and then again, advancing in tiny, almost imperceptible footsteps, nudging me onto the small bed, whereby we proceeded to join, harmoniously, two dissonant worlds.
* * *
One evening I sounded out my sister on the subject of my growing connection with Elizabeth. It wasn’t yet like this was a serious consideration of marriage. I was too young and too penniless, not to mention too jobless, to think ahead more than twenty-four hours. But for all the rationalizations I could make, this woman and I had exchanged intimacies and emotions, and for better or worse, I was crazy about her. I was practically living with the woman. An older woman. A German woman. My wonderful sister, Rhoda, the teacher, four and a half years older than I, had always been my tolerant protector and confidante.
After a little teasing goose step while holding a black comb under her nose, and a quick rendition of “Deutschland Uber Alles” (Rhoda always had a good sense of humor), she suggested that our mother would not be a problem but our father was another story. In fact, she could not control her hysterical laughter at the prospect of my bringing Fräulein Schmidt home to meet Daddy. That larger-than-life daddy whom I had been aiming to please forever. That daddy who ranged from the funniest person I’d ever known to a brooding, angry, extremely stubborn man, who could remember a slight from thirty years ago and get angry all over again. That daddy who hated Germany and Germans. Who’d sooner see me bring home a Zulu maiden than one of them. “You’ve got to be kidding, pussycat,” my sister said, without missing the humor in the, to say the least, incongruous equation. “They’d never turn you and a friend down for dinner, but . . .” She began to laugh again.