In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  It was harder than she had imagined. The scissors were sharp but small and the silky fabric slipped, cutting not in a single smooth line but in jags, like teeth. The curve of the blade was difficult to follow. The hole was a rough oval the size of a child’s palm. It got easier with practice. By the time she had finished she had a pile of almost-circles of different textures and colours, and a heap of dresses, each one with a hole cut out of the back of the skirt. For the first time since coming to Munich she thought of her corner of the studio beside the railway line, the long high window with its white Berlin light. She thought of van Gogh writing to his brother. In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

  She wanted to go home.

  She tucked the circles inside the manicure case and bundled the case and the cut-out dresses into a trunk. She would take those ones with her, she told Jacob’s housekeeper. The rest of the clothes should be disposed of in whatever way she saw fit.

  On the day Emmeline left Munich, Rachmann’s name was once again splashed across the newspaper kiosks. She did not stop. In the first-class dining car she bent her head over her book of van Gogh’s letters but there was no escaping it. The loud-voiced man across the compartment talked of nothing else. The police, he told his companion, had insisted that Rachmann return to Berlin from The Hague for further questioning. Rachmann had agreed. Moreover, as evidence mounted against him, he had promised at last to reveal the name of his Russian collector and to arrange a meeting between the mysterious Muscovite and the Kriminalkommissar in charge of the case.

  Only he had not returned. On the morning he was expected in Berlin he had been found unconscious and with a broken arm at the bottom of the stairs in a hotel in Leiden. He remained much too ill to travel. His official statement blamed a heart attack but the German newspapers were sceptical. There were rumours that Rachmann had been poisoned, that he was the victim of a plot by the mysterious Russian collector who wished him dead, or else by vengeful art dealers, that the doctors themselves were part of the conspiracy. The loud-voiced man said that was what happened when you mixed money and art and he made a noise like an explosion, showering the table with spittle.

  ‘Still, if you had an original right now you’d be sitting pretty,’ he added as his companion blotted his face discreetly with a napkin. ‘They say prices are going through the roof.’

  Emmeline closed her eyes. In Munich, on the platform, Dora had hugged her and when Emmeline tried to pull away she held her closer, her gloved hands against the curve of her shoulder blades.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said and Emmeline had felt the chill of Dora’s ear against her cheek, the narrow leanness of her body, and a tremor had gone through her. Certainty. That for as long as she stood there, for as long as Dora’s arms were around her, she was where she belonged. She stood very still, her eyes closed, feeling the warmth of it spreading through her, softening her bones. Slowly Dora pulled away. Her eyes were dark and deep, and she looked at Emmeline as though she could see right to the bottom of her. She put her hand against Emmeline’s face. She had taken her gloves off, her fingers were cold, cold enough to make Emmeline jump. Dora smiled. Then, standing on tiptoe, she kissed her very lightly on the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Do you think we could start again?’ she said quietly and Emmeline nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Do you think we could start again? She had not known what the words meant then, did not know now, but the thought of them was like a candle flame guttering inside her, provisional but very bright. She breathed slowly, a hand against the tilt beneath her ribs. The muddy fields were giving way to factories, houses, lines of washing. Whatever was going to happen next, it was coming. All she had to do was be there and tell the truth. Or as much of the truth as she dared.

  In Berlin the sun was shining, the blue sky bright and hard like the glaze on a bowl. After the long journey the cold air tasted almost fresh. Emmeline walked to the U-Bahn, feeling the rumble of the trains under her feet. At the station there was a long queue, people were complaining, cursing the ticket seller, the train tracks, the earliness of the hour. Someone jostled someone who asked them if they were blind as well as stupid.

  ‘You going to let me live my damned life?’ the first someone growled back. The Berlin accents were unmistakable.

  Emmeline looked at the queue, the restless, dissatisfied faces. Her luggage had been sent on, she had only a small holdall. Taking it in both her arms like a baby, she began to walk up towards Potsdamer Platz.

  At the corner she stopped. On Bellevuestrasse, where there had been the Grand Bellevue Hotel, there was now scaffolding, some twenty metres high, and on it an enormous advertising hoarding. Beneath a narrow billboard promoting the forthcoming department store, a single vast advertisement had been pasted.

  REINWEISS DENTAL CREAM, it blared above a picture of Vincent van Gogh with a toothbrush jammed between his teeth, white froth spilling down his chin, and underneath it, in huge letters, THE ORIGINAL.

  Frank

  Berlin 1933

  Friday 31 March

  We eat breakfast in silence. Gerda picks her roll into crumbs. I drink my coffee and I think of the expert witness at Rachmann’s trial who talked for an hour about the distinctions between different shades of white. I used to think all silences were the same. It’s late, I say, I have to go, and she nods. We both know it’s the same time it always is.

  I put on my coat and hat. In the kitchen the maid clatters pots. The silence is louder. I should tell Gerda not to worry, that everything will be all right, but the words stick in my throat. Don’t tempt the devil, our grandmother always used to say, glaring at Stefan and me as though she saw him standing there behind us. She was furious if anyone was rash enough to remark favourably on the weather or the punctuality of the trains, dooming her to downpours and delay. Gerda was the only one who ever teased her. Don’t you look well, she used to say, and the old woman would huff and tut and tell Gerda she would be the death of her, as if Gerda was not always her favourite, the one she liked better than any of her own. Her gloomy pessimism made Gerda laugh. She didn’t believe in the devil, not then.

  At the station kiosk I buy a newspaper. All week people have been saying that the Nazis will back down. They may have crushed their communist opposition but moderating elements remain. The Catholic Zentrums, the Social Democrats, the right-wing conservatives: they may have made their own shameful accommodations with Hitler but they surely still have influence, and there have been shocked remonstrations from abroad. Someone, we agree, will do something. They have to. I scour the paper but all I find is a restatement of the order. The boycott of Jewish shops, goods, doctors and lawyers will begin at exactly ten o’clock tomorrow morning. It will continue until the Party leadership orders its cancellation.

  It is another beautiful day. As I walk to the office the sun warms my back and the sky is a perfect blue. Perhaps my old grandmother was right after all. Since they burned down the Reichstag I’ve barely noticed the weather and the result is a March that is more like May. The streets are busy. People walk in and out of the Jewish shops, baskets over their arms. The last ordinary day, I think, but then I have thought that every day for months.

  I see the girl out of the corner of my eye. She is on the other side of the road, a tall girl in a blue coat, her right leg twisting as she swings her crutches. I stop. Everything stops. Her brown hair catches the light. Then a tram rattles past too close and, startled, I step back and by the time it is past me she is gone.

  There will never be another ordinary day.

  I cross the courtyard and hurry up the stairs to my office, but as I reach the first-floor landing Böhm is standing in his doorway.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ he says. ‘Might I borrow you for a moment?’

  Is Böhm Jewish? I don’t know. He and his partner have been in this building almost as long as I have but, before the Rachmann trial a year ag
o, we had never exchanged more than a polite nod on the stairs. Still wouldn’t have, most likely, if it had not been for the critic Köhler-Schultz, who requested his lawyer be present at our interviews. His lawyer, it turned out, was Alfred Böhm. I told Köhler-Schultz there was no need, he was a witness, not a defendant, but he insisted and Böhm seemed happy enough. Two flights up is not unduly onerous, as client demands go.

  Böhm and his partner have carved two offices and a narrow waiting area out of a single first-floor room. The office Böhm ushers me into is hardly as wide as it is tall, with a window divided in half by a plasterboard wall. A man and a woman are sitting in the chairs squeezed in beside his desk. They make a striking couple, him blond and square-jawed, her dark and slender. Böhm introduces us. He says that they are engaged to be married, that they wish to agree a prenuptial contract. It is a condition of the arrangement that both sides take independent legal counsel before the contract is signed. He asks me if I would consider representing Herr Dumier. I smile and nod and offer my congratulations to the happy couple. I’d prefer my new client not to know how badly I need the work.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Dumier says impatiently. ‘Why can’t I just sign now?’

  Böhm considers him coldly. ‘You will consult with a lawyer as stipulated. Herr Berszacki will ensure you understand the implications of the agreement.’

  ‘I understand just fine. If anything happens I get nothing, it all goes to Ivo. I don’t need a lawyer to tell me that. So why can’t I sign?’

  ‘Because you have contractual obligations, Anton,’ Böhm snaps. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was in your interests to make difficulties.’

  The young man grimaces at his fiancée. There are lines around his mouth, he is not as young as he looks. She shrugs and twists the ring on her finger. Her nails are dirty, her fingers stained with black ink. Somehow I can’t imagine her as a blushing bride. Dumier sighs and rubs his face.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Tell me what you need me to do,’ and Böhm nods at me but I don’t see it because I’m looking at Fräulein Eberhardt, at the way she looks at Dumier, not with ardour but openly, steadily, as though there is nothing about her he doesn’t already know. When I ask Dumier to follow me upstairs, my voice sounds hoarse, as though I’ve used it all up.

  Gerda passed a school playground yesterday. The children were singing a skipping song in their piping child voices: Juda verreke, Juda verreke. Perish the Jews. The same five notes over and over, she said, like birdsong.

  Saturday 1 April

  I should work. I brought papers home. Instead I sit on our narrow balcony and write in this diary. Gerda worries, she says these days it’s better not to write things down, but I can’t stop now, not when things are changing so fast. I don’t want to look back when it’s all over and find I no longer remember. In the dark days after the election, drunk on triumph, the SA terrorised this neighbourhood, beating up anyone who looked at them the wrong way—Jewishly. We thought things were getting better. Most of the shops in our neighbourhood are closed for Shabbat but that has not stopped people daubing yellow and black Stars of David on their doors. From where I sit I can see a brownshirt standing outside Corlik’s hardware store and posters pasted over the windows: GERMANS, PROTECT YOURSELVES! DON’T BUY FROM JEWS! and THE JEWS ARE OUR MISFORTUNE. The shop is still open. Arni Corlik would open if the world was ending.

  Families walk together along our street towards the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. As they near Corlik’s they cross the road. No one wants trouble. Corlik’s wife comes out of the shop with a broom and sweeps the step. The brownshirt says something to her. She goes back inside. A moment later she comes back with a cup of tea and, as he takes it, she smiles and I am filled with a sudden and violent rage. I want to know how it is possible that this is happening. It cannot go on, we have all been saying it for months, someone will stop it, and yet no one stops it and it goes on. It gets worse. April 1 and who exactly are the fools?

  I go inside. In the kitchen Gerda is chopping onions. She wipes her eyes. The girl Lena has not come today. She told Gerda it wasn’t safe. Next door the Orlowitzes’ baby is screaming. It screams day and night, it is like an alarm clock that can’t be turned off. Usually it drives me to distraction, but not today. Today I’m glad there are still Jews who refuse to be silenced.

  A was a contented baby, she seldom cried. Sometimes I would come home to find Gerda sitting by her cot. You worry too much, I said once, she won’t stop breathing the moment you leave the room, but Gerda only smiled and traced A’s cheek with her fingertips.

  ‘Do you think the day will come,’ she said wonderingly, ‘when nothing about her stops my heart?’

  Monday 3 April

  The boycott has been called off. Naturally the newspapers declare it a success, the editors who would have dared to say otherwise are long gone, but it is plain that the Nazis have been forced to back down. It is one thing, inciting the rabble to hatred during an election, quite another for a government to order its citizens to turn against their friends and associates. In Berlin, at least, they could not make it stick. Yes, some students at the university picketed the classes of Jewish professors but students have always been hot-headed, it’s part of the job. Most ordinary people were appalled and embarrassed. One of Else Schwarz’s patients left a bunch of irises at her surgery. The card said For Hope.

  When I get to the office the caretaker’s door is padlocked. I’m surprised, recently he has been uncharacteristically assiduous, monitoring comings and goings in a large ledger he keeps on his desk, but today he is nowhere to be seen. And then I turn into the courtyard and I understand. Someone has smashed the window beside the door. Bits of broken glass jut from the frame like teeth. On the wall the line of brass nameplates is slashed with gouts of black paint. LAWYER, ACCOUNTANT, NOTARY, all blacked out and instead, daubed above them in uneven capital letters, DRECKIGE JUDEN—filthy Jews. Not all of the occupants of this building are Jewish but what does that matter? In their zeal they have obliterated us all.

  Wednesday 5 April

  I read the Dumier papers, the contract Böhm has drafted for him to sign. In the event of divorce or death, Anton Dumier and Emmeline Ursula Eberhardt waive their right to share in the property of the other, whether currently held or hereafter acquired. Not so unusual, not these days, not when one or other of the signatories has children or a vast fortune, or both. What’s curious is that neither of these two appear to have either. Neither of them has been previously married. According to the financial statements she has an apartment in Kreuzberg and a modest income from various investments. He has a small salary. It was plain to me that Böhm judged the benefit all on Dumier’s side, but why, if the fiancée is better off than he is? Is Dumier hiding something, assets salted away somewhere he’s not letting on about? And if so, why would she let him get away with it? She didn’t strike me as a pushover, quite the opposite. I had the impression of someone who was in no doubt about what they were doing.

  Then, going down the stairs, I pass her coming up, Fräulein Eberhardt, and suddenly I am eight years old and convinced I can conjure people out of thin air just by thinking about them. I had forgotten the jolt of it, the shocking lurch of power. She glances at me strangely and I nod and hurry away. In the courtyard the cherry tree is starting to blossom, the sticky buds splitting to show ruffled pink tongues. I am thinking about the blossom when I pass a man in dirty canvas trousers smoking in a doorway. I hardly glance at him, then he turns away from me and, though I do not see his face, there is something sharply familiar about the bulk of him, the way he moves.

  It is only when I return to my office and the Rachmann boxes stacked in labelled towers against the walls that it drops like a coin into a slot. Rachmann’s brother, Gregor. He sat across from me every day of both trials, his shoulders hunched in just that way, but why? He lives in Düsseldorf, or he did then. Is he here to see me? I peer out of the window but I cannot see that part of the street from here and any
way, when I came back past the doorway he was gone. I sit down, pick up my pen. Then I put it down. I go out on to the landing, look down the stairs. There is no one there. Of course there isn’t, I’m being foolish. Yes, families sometimes take it badly when it goes the wrong way and, yes, the Rachmann brothers were close, unusually so, I thought, but Rachmann has been in prison for nearly a year. If his brother had scores to settle, he would have settled them long ago.

  And yet. A week ago an old (Jewish) colleague who lodged a complaint against his (Jewish) client’s illegal arrest was paraded through the streets of Munich, barefoot and bloody-nosed, a sign around his neck that read I will never again complain to the police. Berlin is not Munich, but the SA is still the SA. If Gregor Rachmann thinks now is the time to take matters into his own hands, who exactly is going to stop him?

  When I get home I go straight to our bedroom. I am being alarmist, I know, but I take this diary from the night table and put it in the drawer. The drawer locks. I put the key on the ring I keep in my pocket. I tell myself it is a kindness to Gerda, that she worries too much as it is.

  The door to A’s room is open. Gerda is sitting on the bed, A’s worn-out toy rabbit on her lap. Philip, A called him, after Fidgety Philip in the Struwwelpeter stories. A’s toys were never well-behaved. When Gerda sees me she puts the rabbit back on the pillow and stands up. It’s Wednesday. She meets the other mothers for coffee on Wednesday mornings, she never misses it. Wednesdays are usually one of the better days.