by Clare Clark
We sip his wine and listen to Gerda clattering dishes in the kitchen. Neither of us wants to start the conversation he has come here to have. I see him looking at the shabby sofa, the walls that need repainting. Stefan’s villa in Hannover is very large and very new.
‘Gerda says you’re no longer on the telephone,’ he says.
‘We decided we didn’t need it. There’s a public box on the corner.’
‘So you’re all right, you’re not struggling too badly?’
I am not sure which infuriates me more, the remark or Stefan’s faux-paternal tone. The last time we met my brother told me why the NSDAP offered the only viable future for Germany. He put them in. Now he is bailing out.
‘We’re terrific,’ I say. ‘Thank God you stood firm against those Commie bastards.’
Stefan sighs. ‘Please, Frank, not tonight.’ His voice is clammy with forbearance. Stefan is three years my junior but you’d never guess it. Since the age of fourteen, when our father died and he grew four inches, Stefan has determined to look down on me. Over the years he has honed condescension to an art form.
Gerda calls us through to the dining room. It is not yet dark but she has lit candles. The flames flicker palely in the blue air. We eat soup and rouladen. Even the soup sticks in my throat. Stefan opens a second bottle of wine and I set about drinking it while Gerda asks the questions I cannot. Stefan is taking his family to Belgium. His wife’s cousin owns a small company in Antwerp that manufactures children’s toys, demand is picking up but he needs capital to expand. With Stefan’s money they can set up a second manufactory near Brussels. It will take everything he has but Stefan is determined. At his bank all the Jewish directors have already been dismissed and, though promises have been made for their reemployment, nothing has been done. Stefan says he cannot sit idly by and wait until the nightmare burns itself out. He is afraid he will be next. I wonder if he thinks he will be richer in Belgium.
‘You are letting them win,’ Gerda says. Her cheeks are flushed, with anger or with wine, I cannot tell.
‘Dear Gerda, do you honestly believe that staying will change anything? You are a principled woman and I admire that, but principles won’t protect you against thugs with rubber truncheons. Frank, surely you don’t agree with her? You’re not a fool, you know as well as I that anyone with any sense is getting out.’
‘Is it only bankers who cannot tell the difference between sense and money?’ I say sardonically to Gerda but Stefan only sighs.
‘You’re not a pauper, Frank. I know change isn’t easy for you but you need to wake up, see the way the wind is blowing.’ He shakes his head at me and I am fifteen again, I want to punch his patronising mouth.
‘I don’t understand you, Stefan,’ I say angrily. ‘Don’t you see that if you run away now, you leave everyone else in the lurch? You are a Jew, whether you want to be or not, and as a Jew you have to stand firm. How do you think anything will change if we don’t stand firm?’ It startles me, how strongly I suddenly feel about staying.
‘How can I stay? My responsibility is to my family, I have to think of my children.’
The word hangs in the air. Stefan looks at the table. He straightens his knife. When he looks up at me his face is very stiff, a mask through which his eyes burn.
‘Mina has been expelled from school,’ he says quietly. ‘The new quotas, she’s meant to be exempt but the head is a Party member, he doesn’t care for exemptions. He says she is disruptive. Mina, the bookworm, who wants only to learn. The boys, they still go. They sit at the back of the classroom on a special yellow bench for Jews. They are no longer allowed to go on school outings or to sing the school songs. Last week Rudy was made to stand at the front of the class while his teacher pointed out his deceitful Jewish features. Now the other children call him Schweinjude, Jewish pig. Tell me, Frank, do you really think I can stay?’
The speech uses up all the air in the room. Gerda brings a cheesecake and I shake my head but Stefan takes a piece and makes a pretence of eating it. Stefan’s children have not been raised as Jews. Their neighbourhood in Hannover has no synagogue. When Gerda rises to take the plates into the kitchen he puts a hand on my arm. I stare at the signet ring on his third finger, the elaborate pattern of his initials engraved in the green stone. Then I move my arm away.
‘It is not yet as bad here as it is in Hannover,’ he says. ‘But it will be. You have to leave while you still can.’
I snort. ‘You think we can leave now?’
‘For God’s sake, Frank, why must you be so stubborn? If you really don’t have the money, and if you don’t, God knows why not, I’ve been telling you for years, then maybe we can help. I’d have to talk it over with Bettina, of course—’
His sentence tails off but we both know how it ends. Bettina is not an uncharitable woman but she is a German in the Lutheran style, she believes that God helps those who help themselves. I look at Stefan and somewhere inside me, beneath the anger and the exasperation, I feel the ache of something old and deep. I wish we had made a better job of being brothers.
‘Thank you,’ I say and I almost mean it. ‘But we aren’t leaving.’
‘Don’t drag your damned pride into this, Frank. You have to think of Gerda.’
And just like that we’re back where we started. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ I snap. ‘Gerda doesn’t want to leave any more than I do.’
‘Then it’s your job to persuade her she’s wrong.’
‘Christ, Stefan, why do you persist in believing that what’s right for you is right for everybody else?’
‘Why do you have to be such a blind bloody fool?’
‘Stop it.’ Gerda stands in the doorway, a clean dish in her hands. ‘Both of you, please. Just stop it.’ She has put an apron on over her blue dress. We sit silently as she opens the sideboard and puts the dish away.
‘It’s late, I should go,’ Stefan says. I nod but he does not get up. He interlaces his hands on the table. The green of his ring gleams between his fingers.
‘When do you leave?’ I ask. The question sounds so final. I know it’s the wine and the worry and the bone-aching weariness of it all but I am suddenly afraid that I will never see him or his children again.
Friday 26 May
I don’t recognise my office since Böhm took it over. You can see the floor. There are neatly labelled plan chests and framed watercolours on the walls, hills and lakes. All it lacks is a Persian carpet and a pianoforte.
I’m grateful really. The lower rent gives me breathing space for a few months. Perhaps things will have picked up by then. Some of my bills are still outstanding, I should chase them up. Then I think of Erna Buttel’s cousin who was reported to the SA for levying an excessive rate of interest on unpaid bills and is now in a camp at Osthofen. The customer who accused him was a crook who had evaded repayment for years but who cares about the facts? The cousin is Jewish and therefore guilty.
As for the book, I’ve thought many times about going back to Matthias, pleading with him to change his mind, but since Opernplatz I’ve lost the appetite. The newspapers claim that only a handful of ‘harmful and undesirable’ books have been withdrawn from circulation but people say 20,000 books were burned here in Berlin that night and that the bonfires continue at schools and universities around Germany.
Just how big are these bastards’ hands?
Thursday 1 June
It’s been nearly three weeks and still no reply from Gregor Rachmann so this evening two men deliver his crates to our apartment. There’s a tea chest too, heavy with books. Gerda doesn’t want them here, neither do I, but there’s nowhere else they can go. When I asked Scherek, the grizzled Polish superintendent of our apartment building, if I could store them in the cellar, he said it was forbidden. We both know he’s allowed other tenants to do it in the past but he wouldn’t budge. I can’t blame him. It would mean bending the rules and these days who wants to take the risk?
It takes the men several trips to
lug everything up the stairs. According to the docket the crates contain eight canvases and a display case. I remember the case, a deep box of a thing several feet across and painted to look like a garden. A Monet copy, someone claimed, though even Voigt wasn’t stupid enough to try that in court. According to Matthias the case was a commission, only the customer who ordered it never picked it up. He said Gregor kept it as a warning, in case he was ever again stupid enough not to take payment upfront.
Gerda comes out of the kitchen as I am signing for them. I can hear the little exhalation she makes when she sees them stacked up in the hallway. The men have made it clear that this is as far as they go.
‘It’s only for a few days,’ I say to Gerda. Beside her the delivery man raises his hand and I’m afraid he is going to salute, but he only tugs his cap and pockets the coins I give him. As I close the door behind him Gerda touches the wall.
‘They’ve scraped the paint,’ she says.
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Gerda traces the mark with her finger. She opens her mouth and I think she is going to say something but she closes it again and goes back to the kitchen.
The crates are awkward. Using one foot as a sort of runner I half-lift, half-slide one down the corridor. The wood is rough, splinters jab into my fingers. At A’s door I hesitate, catching my breath. Then I push open the door.
The room is just as it was. Gerda insisted, she was mad with the need for it, the perfect precision of the pain. She wouldn’t let me touch anything. Stefan said I shouldn’t listen, he said it was morbid, but I couldn’t talk about it with Gerda, it was like twisting a broken bone. I told Stefan the time would come.
Time passed but it never came. Gerda was right, it is a comfort to sit here, to see what she saw. It’s not quite the same, of course, not any more. The foot of the green bedspread is bleached grey from the sun and the pictures we cut from magazines are yellowed and starting to peel. Gerda would not let us paste on to the walls, she said it spoiled the paint, so we made a frame from balsa wood and hung it above the chest of drawers. A said it was better than any painting in the museum. She said she would paste a new set of pictures on to it every year of her life for ever and ever. It would be like the Elba Sandstone Mountains at school, she said, one stratum laid down on top of the other.
As old as the hills. I can’t think that. We managed three layers, two in the corner where Clara Bow smiles the secret smile A could not bring herself to cover up, but there is a topography to it all the same, rucks in the paper and air bubbles and lumps where A used too much paste. On some of the faces you can see the ghost of the person underneath.
I stack the biggest crates against the wardrobe, the small ones between the chest of drawers and the wall. The room is too small for a desk so I built a foldaway table on the wall which A could unlatch to do her homework. More of a shelf than a table really, but A liked it. I hung another shelf above the bed for her books. The Call of the Wild is at the end of the row, wedged by the sea urchin fossil we found on the beach at Rüden. A and I read it over and over again, that last summer, captivated by Buck, the dog who must summon the wildness in himself to survive. And then with a jerk I remember: Jack London is banned. Hurriedly I take the book to our bedroom and, as I hide it at the back of the wardrobe, I think of the picture A always turned to first, the colour plate of Buck facing the pale-eyed wolf pack and underneath the line that made her draw in her breath: ‘It was to the death.’
Gerda is in the kitchen putting away the last of the supper dishes. She looks round as I come in. ‘We should charge,’ she says.
‘I’ll add it to the bill.’
‘He still hasn’t paid you?’
‘I’m trying.’
‘I don’t want those things here.’
‘I know. I don’t want them here either.’
Gerda sighs, staring down into the sink. I put my arms around her, my belly against her back. I am short but she is shorter. My cheek rests against the twist of her hair. She stands stiffly, her hands clasped, but when I pull her closer something in her goes slack. She turns her head, her temple against my lips.
‘Just a few days?’ she murmurs and, when I nod, she threads her fingers through mine and we stand there in the raw glare of the electric light, our shared shadow draped over the draining board like a cloth.
Tuesday 13 June
Anton Dumier writes to me. He apologises for not settling his bill, his employer has let him go and he has some temporary financial difficulties. He asks for more time. The sum is small, it shouldn’t matter, but we both know it does, just as we both know I will accept whatever payment he chooses to give me. Thank God, then, that there is some good news at last. I have, wonder of wonders, a new client, a clerk in a printing company charged with embezzlement. The case is not entirely without hope. My client is Jewish but so are the company’s owners so the disadvantage is equal on both sides. I meet with him at Zoo police station. He is a small, bald man with bad breath and a brusque manner but his eyes bulge with terror, he sings with it like a struck glass. He tells me again and again that he has been set up, that he never broke a law in his life. It will be all right, won’t it, he asks again and again like a child, tell me it will all be all right, but I don’t, I can’t. I think of A’s first day at the Grundschule, her grey coat and her shoes shining like horse chestnuts.
‘Remember, there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ I said at the gate and she sucked in her cheeks and tugged her hand from mine.
‘You don’t know that,’ she said and walked away without looking back.
Thursday 22 June
When will Gregor Rachmann answer my letters? I can’t stand those bloody crates. I want things back the way they were, when I could open A’s door and slip fleetingly, exquisitely, into the before. Now even the familiar smells of beeswax and unworn clothes have faded, routed by the reek of raw wood.
Saturday 24 June
Stefan is back in Berlin. He cabled yesterday, asked me to meet him tonight at his hotel. I’m late. Allied warplanes have been spotted over Berlin, according to the newspapers, and in response there is a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ along Unter den Linden. I have to duck into a shop to avoid giving the salute as it passes. The girl behind the counter eyes me suspiciously. I should buy something but I can’t spare the money. I slink away like a thief, empty-handed.
Stefan is waiting for me in the bar. Aside from a group of men in loosened ties at the back, we are the only people here. The place is nondescript, a little shabby, a facsimile of a hundred other anonymous hotels in Berlin. A mirror emblazoned with the name of a brand of beer hangs from a chain on the wall. It is not at all Stefan’s kind of place. It smells of cigarettes and sweat.
Stefan is awkward, solicitous and distracted at the same time. He asks after Gerda and his smile flickers like a faulty light. His foot jerks. It makes me nervous. When he summons the tired-looking waitress I ask for a glass of beer.
‘Two,’ he says. Stefan has never liked beer. When she comes back with the drinks he takes a swallow and I wait for the grimace, the dismissive I don’t know how you drink this stuff, but he puts the glass down carefully on its wet ring and frowns at it and suddenly I know exactly why he’s come.
‘Don’t you dare say anything,’ I say and, when he looks up, startled, I glare at him. ‘Not now and not ever. You’re going, I understand that, but it’s too late. Nothing you say now will ever change that.’
Stefan’s shoulders sag. ‘Oh, Frank.’ He sounds defeated.
‘I mean it. I’m going to finish my beer and then I’m going home.’
‘Wait, Frank, that’s not—please. I have no right, I understand that, but I have to ask you something. A favour.’
Like sauce from a bottle it comes, slowly at first and then all at once. Bettina’s cousin is impatient, Stefan is needed in Antwerp to get the new factory up and running. He has resigned from the bank or the bank from him, I’m not sure which. Either way they have given up their house.
He’ll send for Bettina and the children as soon as he’s settled, but till then Bettina’s friend Else has agreed they can stay with her. The two women are close, like sisters, and because Else’s flat is nearby the boys can stay on at their old school. It’s a good arrangement, except for one thing. Else’s apartment is small. While the boys can bunk up with Else’s son, there is no room for Mina. Of course Bettina would rather keep them together but they must manage the best they can and with no school Mina could go anywhere—
‘You want us to have her.’ My astonishment makes it sound like a question.
‘I’m asking you to think about it,’ Stefan says. ‘It would only be for a month or two, just till things are settled. I’d help, of course, with her keep. She’s a good girl, Frank. She wouldn’t be any trouble.’
I haven’t seen Mina since the funeral. Before that we used to visit Stefan and Bettina in Hannover perhaps once a year. The German holidays, not the Jewish ones. A looked forward to those visits for months. Once she even had Gerda make her a paper chart so that she could cross off the days until it was time to go. Mina was two years older than A, a goddess-queen, and A her willing slave. The last ever time we went Gerda went upstairs and found A so tightly wrapped in bandages she could hardly breathe. She would not let Gerda unwrap her. She was hurt, she told Gerda earnestly, Mina was making her better.
‘Perhaps a different game,’ Gerda said to Mina but Mina shook her head.
‘She likes this one,’ she said and it was true, she did.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say now. ‘Why us?’