by Clare Clark
Of course Rachmann will have to agree. For a celebrity he has a surprising dislike of the limelight, but I am hopeful. What is the harm in being hailed as a hero? Especially since he really, really needs the money.
Monday 1 May
Urschel comes to see me. Urschel & Böhm is to be dissolved. Böhm is an Aryan, under the new law their partnership is no longer permitted. Böhm wants Urschel to keep their office, he says he will find another place, but they have only just renewed their lease and Urschel knows what Böhm earns, he can’t ask him to pay twice. He frowns at me, twisting his fingers together.
‘Would you swap?’ he asks abruptly. Böhm’s office is smaller than this one, he admits, but it is also cheaper. I hesitate. I like my privacy, I do not want to share. The money, though. I tell him I’ll think about it. At the door he pauses.
‘Perhaps we should go into partnership ourselves,’ he says. ‘Urschel and Berszacki. Berszacki and Urschel. It has a certain ring, don’t you think?’
I laugh or try to. It is only when he is gone that I wonder if he didn’t mean it as a joke. Urschel & Berszacki, the rocks in each other’s pockets. Perhaps he is right. If we must go down, at least let it be fast.
I get home late. The parlour is dark. I think of all the Friday nights we sat together in this room when A was little, the long shadows from the Shabbat candles, the smell of roast chicken and warm bread. We no longer bother to observe the Shabbat. It does not seem worth all the trouble, just for the two of us. I switch on the lamp. Gerda is sitting in the wing chair by the window. She raises a hand, shading her eyes against the sudden light. She has a photograph album open in her lap.
I lean down and kiss the top of her head. A grins up at me. She wears a striped dress with a white collar and her legs are skinny and very straight. Gerda closes the album. I put my hand on her shoulder and she leans her face against my wrist, and just like that I am nineteen again and in the parlour of her parents’ apartment on the Schönhauser Allee with its lace curtains and the huge mahogany sideboard with the glass-fronted display case that took up all the room. She used to catch my hand and press it to her cheek when her mother turned to pour the tea. I had forgotten but my body remembers. I don’t say anything. I stand very still with my hand on her shoulder, back at the beginning.
Tuesday 2 May
I spend the morning at the Kammergericht. The sun streams through the high windows, lighting columns of silvery dust. I watch them turn. An eternity ago, studying for my Bar examinations in this same library, I used to imagine the dust as the residue of intense concentration, hundreds of thousands of tiny particles of thought. Now the idea unnerves me. These days we’re better off keeping our thoughts to ourselves.
In the lobby I see Voigt from the prosecutor’s office, a junior clutching a tower of files panting in his wake. Voigt is a man always in a hurry but when I nod at him he stops. The junior staggers gratefully to a halt.
‘Berszacki,’ he says. I wait for the crack—there’s always a crack with Voigt, like a schoolboy, he considers insults the essence of camaraderie—but today he claps my shoulder and tells me I look well. I smile but I don’t like it. I want him to ask me how the weather is down there, to tell me that the way my hairline’s going, it won’t be long before he can read my mind. I want things back the way they were.
Later a clerk telephones from his office. I shouldn’t be surprised. Voigt’s memory is arranged into faces and favours: whenever he sees one he matches it with the other. The clerk tells me that three months ago the prosecutor’s office released the evidence from the Rachmann trial. However, and despite several legal notices, Gregor Rachmann has yet to claim the crates of paintings seized from his studio. Storage space is limited and unclaimed items will be destroyed. Would I accept responsibility for said items on Herr Rachmann’s behalf and make the necessary arrangements for their return? I think of Gregor Rachmann ducking away from me in the doorway. I still think I glimpse him sometimes in a crowded street.
‘Herr Voigt is grateful for your cooperation,’ the clerk adds blandly and my scalp prickles. These days even the mildest remark sounds like a threat.
Wednesday 3 May
At breakfast Gerda is pale. Her shoulders sag. I ask her if she has one of her headaches coming on and she shakes her head. Just a bit tired, she says. Wednesday is her coffee morning day, she doesn’t like to miss it, but today she says she thinks she’ll stay at home.
‘Another twenty years and the Orlewitz baby will move out,’ I say and she tries to smile. Neither of us slept well. When I got home yesterday evening there was a letter waiting. No stamp, it had been delivered by hand, but Stefan was still careful. There are changes at his bank in Hannover. He is considering a new job in Antwerp. There are arrangements to be made, he needs to come to Berlin. He asks if he can see us while he is here.
Did he really think we wouldn’t understand? My brother, who has spent his whole adult life refusing to be a Jew, is bailing out. His bank has let him go and in turn he is letting go of the rest of us. He doesn’t care that we have as much right to be here as anyone, that in leaving he plays into their hands. A business opportunity, he calls it. Of course he does. He’s never going to admit that he’s running away.
Last night I punched my fist into the wall. This morning I take Gerda’s hand and I tell her we can leave too if that is what she wants, that there are places we could go until things calm down, there are firms in Amsterdam and The Hague that specialise in German law. I don’t say that you could count the positions in these firms on the fingers of two hands, that I don’t speak Dutch and anyway we haven’t the money, that even without the emigration taxes and the forced exchange rates we wouldn’t have enough to start again. I’ve promised myself that I will offer Gerda the choice, that if she really wants to go then I will see what can be done.
Fine words and finer sentiments. They might even mean something if I didn’t already know she would never leave. They would have to burn our building to the ground before she would abandon this apartment, the rooms where we lived together, the three of us. She clings to the traces A has left here, the ink stain on the kitchen floor, the scuffs on the paintwork, the pencil marks on the cupboard door where we marked her height. I can’t bring myself to tell her that, if things go on like this, we will have to find somewhere cheaper. She knows things are bad but she never asks what will happen to us. Gerda has no interest in the future. Everything she wants is already in the past.
Friday 5 May
Diefenbach has gone. He was scrupulous and widely respected, but someone has decreed that the Senior District Attorney must be a National Socialist so he’s out. Not one judge in Berlin has raised an objection.
I go to see Böhm. I want to tell him he can have my office and his own, that I refuse to practise in a country where the law bends so readily to political ends, but I already know it isn’t true. I’ll swap with him and I’ll go on, chicken that I am, squawking and scratching in the dirt for flecks of grain. The law is all I know, and we have to live.
Böhm is outside his office, fumbling with his keys. He’s wearing a stand-up collar and a white rose on his lapel. May 5th, of course, Anton Dumier’s wedding day. I had forgotten. I tell him he can have my office and when he asks if I’m sure I shrug.
‘A change is as good as a rest, don’t they say?’ I say, and the shame moves through me like a fever, hot and cold. ‘How was the wedding?’
‘Official. I just hope Dumier’s grateful,’ and, just like that, the penny drops.
‘She did it for him?’ I ask. Böhm looks down at the rose in his buttonhole as though he’s not sure how it got there. Extracting it, he drops it in the wastepaper basket.
‘Happy days,’ he says flatly and goes in.
Saturday 6 May
It startles me to discover that, in all the boxes and boxes of papers, I have only one document in Matthias’s own hand. It is a statement Matthias gave to the Dutch police in February 1929. By then the police had let him go,
there was not enough evidence to hold him, but the case against him was mounting: in a single month Moscow denied knowledge of any Russian collection of van Goghs, the Swiss police drew a blank on Russian emigres, and the Nationalgalerie declared all thirty-two of his pictures to be fakes. Then a police raid on Gregor Rachmann’s studio in Düsseldorf turned up a clutch of doctored canvases. They weren’t van Goghs, only some anonymous nineteenth-century landscapes Gregor was ‘improving’ to sell on and not in itself illegal, but still it looked very bad. Beleaguered and desperate for allies, the Rachmann brothers smuggled nine of the contested paintings out of Germany to The Hague, where they showed them to Clovis Hendriksen, Holland’s pre-eminent van Gogh expert. A week later, Matthias was in hospital.
I read the second half of his statement three times.
On Saturday 2 February I travelled to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum. Near the Nieuwmarkt I was approached by a man who spoke German. He was dark & of medium height with a strong beard. His German was good. He told me his name was Zima & that he was interested in buying art. He invited me to join him for a meal. We went to a small restaurant on the Damrak. I do not remember the name. Afterwards I returned to Leiden by train.
During the night I fell ill. There was a stabbing pain in my abdomen, nausea & dizziness. My vision was blurred. I went out on to the landing, I wanted to call for a doctor, but I must have blacked out. When I came to I was in the hospital. My arm was broken. Dr Haak told me I had suffered a heart attack, that the attack had caused me to fall down the stairs. I told him I had been poisoned but he refused to examine me. I demanded that the nurse take samples of my blood &c. for testing. I also asked to see another doctor. Both requests were denied.
On Monday 4 February Dr Haak visited me alone. He told me that I had not been poisoned and that I should drop the matter. His tone was very threatening. When I told him I wanted to speak to the police Dr Haak left the room. I knew then that I was in danger. At my insistence my brother arranged for me to be brought here.
I was both relieved and astonished when the prosecution didn’t use the statement at trial. I feared it would sink us, either the paranoia or the sheer unscrupulousness of it. Back then I was quite certain that Matthias had poisoned himself. If he was to have a chance he had to win support for his paintings from experts who believed they were genuine, but he knew that would take time. During the nine weeks Matthias was in hospital and beyond the reach of the Berlin police, his new friend Hendriksen declared seven of his nine van Goghs to be genuine and persuaded several of his influential clients to buy them. He even bought one himself. By the time Matthias finally discharged himself from hospital, most of the Dutch art establishment had taken his side. A happy accident? In Matthias’s hotel room the Dutch police found a bottle of tincture of aconite root, a common treatment for tonsillitis. In large doses aconite root is poisonous.
But reading the statement again, what strikes me now is the terror in it. Matthias knew the police were closing in, but he also knew that the evidence against him was circumstantial at best. What if his fear was not of Kriminalkommissar Gans but of someone closer and more ruthless? In his testimony Matthias always insisted that he had given the Russian his word of honour, but everyone knows vows, like arms, can be broken. The hospital might not have tested for poisoning, but the wrist was real enough. I saw the X-rays.
What if Matthias did not admit himself to hospital to avoid arrest? What if he was simply trying to stay alive?
Sunday 7 May
I go to Tegel to see Matthias. I take sausage, cigarettes. The last time I was here we argued about money. I want him to know I come in good faith. When I hand the items in, I ask the warder how he is doing. Tegel is grisly for everyone and grislier still for men like him. The warder shrugs.
‘Knows how to handle himself,’ he says. ‘No flies on him.’
I sign the book. No one has visited Matthias since the last time I came. If Gregor has been in Berlin he has not been here. I go through to the cell. Matthias is already there, sitting at the table. We talk about this and that. He stares at the table, asks me how I am managing. I’m not the one locked in here, I say, but he shakes his head.
‘Safer inside,’ he says. ‘You have been a good friend to me, Frank. I’m in your debt. We both are. And we will repay you, I swear it. As soon as we can.’ He looks up at me, into me. His eyes search mine. ‘Don’t lose faith. We mustn’t lose faith.’
I lost my faith a long time ago but I don’t say so. There’s something about Matthias Rachmann that makes me want to believe, for both our sakes. I take the book proposal from my briefcase and hand it to him. He reads it. Then he pushes it back across the table and shakes his head. He says he’s sorry but that time is past, there’s nothing to be gained from raking it up.
‘We’d do it your way, however you wanted,’ I say. ‘Think about it, at least. You need the money. I know I do.’
‘And you’ll get it, I swear. As soon as it’s safe. You have my word.’
After that there isn’t much to say. I tell Matthias about Gregor’s crates. Immediately he stiffens. He wants to know what the process is for returning them to Gregor, what address I have for him, that everything that was seized will be returned. When I tell him there’s nothing missing some of the tension goes out of him.
‘Right. Good. Only I gave Gregor my word he’d get it all back. Every last thing.’
‘Then he needs to answer my letters. I can’t send anything without his signature.’
‘So until you have that the crates are your responsibility?’
‘It would appear so.’
We are both silent then. I can hear Matthias breathing. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ I blurt. ‘That in all this time he hasn’t once come to see you?’
Matthias looks at me. I can’t read his face, I have no idea what he’s thinking. ‘They are still our brothers, aren’t they?’ he says softly. ‘However many times they disappoint us.’
So much I told him in those dark days. I always thought it was the trial that saved me, that kept me from drowning in the darkness, but perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was Matthias himself.
Wednesday 10 May
Tonight there is a public burning of library books by students in Opernplatz, outside the University. The event is broadcast live on the wireless.
‘I consign everything unGerman to the flames,’ the leader of the students proclaims. He has to shout to be heard over the bonfire which roars like something alive. The crowd whoops. As the students throw the books on to the fire a band plays and the radio announcer lists the authors whose work is to be banned. Communists, yes, but Jews too, the names go on and on. Albert Einstein. Stefan Zweig. Erich Kästner. I bought a copy of Emil and the Detectives to give A for Christmas. It’s still hidden at the back of the wardrobe, wrapped in its shiny red paper.
We do not stay up to hear Goebbels make his speech. It is late and there is nothing left to say. Just after dawn, while the light beneath the curtain is still grainy and grey, Gerda rolls over silently in bed, curving her back into the shape of me. The years and rough weather have eroded us until we fit against one another like the boulders of some primitive temple. In defiance of gravity, of memory, we hold each other up.
Friday 19 May
Our maid Lena left this morning. She has another job. She refused to work her notice. She told Gerda to watch her step, her new employer is a high-up in the Nazi party and he likes to keep dirty Jews in their place. Her rudeness was prodigious and exultant. After she was gone Gerda found she had taken the good tablecloth and the last of the silver teaspoons.
‘Good riddance,’ Gerda says but her eyes are red. My hand shakes as I unlock the drawer of my night table and find to my relief that this diary is still inside. I do not know which is stronger in me, the hatred I feel towards Lena or the relief that she has spared me the shame of admitting we can’t afford to keep her.
Tuesday 23 May
Stefan is already at the apartment when I get home.
It is a warm evening, he is sitting by the open windows. Gerda sits in the upright chair by the table. She is wearing her good blue dress. Stefan stands to greet me, a glass in his hand.
‘Frank, a drink,’ he says. The wine is French, he tells me, from the Loire valley. He says something about the year that means nothing to me and pours me a glass. Already he is the host. He gestures at Gerda with the bottle and Gerda gives me a look and covers her glass with her hand. I am late.
‘A long day,’ I say. The wine is a pale clear yellow. I take a gulp and Stefan coughs out one of his wry little laughs. Too late I see that he has raised his glass.
‘You Berliners,’ he says. ‘Always rush, rush, rush.’
Five minutes and already antagonism sours my mouth. I don’t want it to be like this, not today. Forcing a smile, I clink my glass against his.
‘It’s good to see you,’ I say. ‘Thank you for the wine.’
Stefan nods, touches the neck of the bottle. ‘We can’t take it with us.’
There is a silence. Gerda gets up and goes into the kitchen to see about supper. On the balcony her flowers tumble from their pots, a tangle of pink and white.
‘I suggested a restaurant but Gerda wouldn’t hear of it,’ Stefan says. ‘She said she’d already cooked.’ He murmurs something about it smelling good but I know Gerda’s refusal annoys him. He would have preferred a restaurant. Not for the food, Stefan doesn’t care much for food, but because he likes to run the show, to patronise the maitre d’ and order the wine and insist on everyone having the steak because it is the speciality of the house and the only dish worth eating on the menu. His party, his rules.