“What did Vera mean when she said that she’d solve all the mysteries for me?” I ask Isaac as he and I head home. “Do you think she knows for sure who murdered Heidi and Dr Stangl?”
“I have no idea,” he says.
“Was she involved in their deaths?”
“I only know what she promised me—that she didn’t kill them.”
At dawn the next morning, Isaac picks Vera up and they drive across Germany to Cologne. After a quick supper together in a beer hall she’s always liked near the main train station, he drops her at her cousins’ apartment, then speeds back to Berlin. He manages to make it home by eight in the morning. He’s been up for twenty-eight straight hours when I visit him. He’s washing dishes in the pajamas I bought for his seventieth birthday, barefoot. His eyes are red and his back is bent, but he claims he’s drunk too much coffee to sleep. I make him sit down and heat up some milk, then pour it into a glass with a healthy shot of schnapps. Leaving Berlin seems to have been good for our intimacy, if not his body; as I put him to bed, he talks about his concern for Vera and, pressing my hand to his stubbly cheek, begs me to stay with him. So I call the school and leave a message for Else saying I’ll be late to work, then lie down next to him, caressing his beautiful hair. Once he’s snoring, I sit at his desk and watch him. He’s part of my breathing now. That’s what I realize while he sleeps.
Will either of us ever see Vera again?
K-H and Marianne visit Isaac a few nights later, distraught. Her cousin in London has written that he will be unable to sponsor them because he is opening a second creamery in Manchester. She shows us the letter, which is written in German: “Once the new creamery starts turning a profit, I assure you we’ll apply for your visas, though we’ve been told that your deafness may complicate matters.”
Shanghai is said to be accepting Jews, and she and K-H have applied for visas there in case the United States also fails them.
On the radio that evening, Monday, the 7th of November, Hansi and I hear a news bulletin about the attempted assassination of Ernst vom Rath, the Third Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. His assailant is reported to be a seventeen-year-old German Jew named Herschel Grynszpan. He apparently walked into the embassy and asked to speak to Ambassador von Welczek. Vom Rath was sent out to meet with the boy, who promptly shot him twice in the abdomen.
Vom Rath teeters between life and death for two days. Isaac prays he falls on the side of life, fearing reprisals, since the newspapers are full of grotesque threats against the Jews and the need for a final resolution to what they call the “Jewish question.”
Rumors I hear at school explain away Grynszpan’s act as the result of vom Rath having broken off their secret love affair. Only after the war do we learn that the boy’s parents, sister, and brother had been shoved on boxcars and shipped to Poland in late October.
On Wednesday the 9th, vom Rath dies, and his assassination is described as a moral outrage by the Nazi leadership. Later that day, two Gestapo men arrive at Isaac’s warehouse and factory, searching for weapons, but all they find is an old saber stored in a backroom. “My army sword,” Isaac explains. “Stupid of me to forget it. I could have sold it and used the funds to help get more people out of Germany.”
That night, near midnight, I awake to the sound of shouting. I rush into my old bedroom, worried about Hansi. He’s standing bare-chested at the window, which he’s thrown open.
“Are you all right?” I ask him.
He nods, then makes a breaking motion with his hands and designs the sign for glass. He points down Marienburger Straße. I slip in beside him and lean out. The sidewalk outside Frau Koslowski’s grocery is covered with shards from her shattered window.
“Burglars,” I whisper. “I better call the police.” He shakes his head and crosses his index finger and thumb—his shorthand for swastika.
“Nazis broke her windows?” I ask.
“Yes,” he signs, so I go back to the sitting room and slip on my clothes. Papa is home tonight and comes to me, scratching his head, also bare-chested.
“Where are you going?” he asks me in a drowsy voice.
“Someone’s robbed Frau Koslowski,” I lie. “I’ll just check she’s all right.”
“Sophie, let the police handle it!” he orders.
I go to the door. “Watch Hansi,” I tell him.
Outside, I smell smoke from the west mixing with the odor of hops. And I hear shouting voices, which must mean a crowd has assembled wherever the fire is, but I go instead to Frau Koslowski’s grocery. I walk slowly, tense, ready to run, because I realize that my neighborhood—the east, west, north, and south of my mind—is no longer safe. A puddle of milk has spilled through Frau Koslowski’s smashed doorway; several of the shelves have been knocked to the floor.
I find the old woman sitting in her beige nightgown at the back of the shop, in front of the doorway to her flat, pressing a bloody towel to her cheek with her bony hand.
Another woman is sitting next to her, young, in a rumpled floral dress. I’ve seen her in the neighborhood before. She looks up at me, startled.
“I’m a friend,” I say. “I live just down the street.”
“I’m her upstairs neighbor,” the woman tells me.
“It’s me, Sophie, Frau Koslowski,” I say, waving.
She looks up at me with pink, squinting eyes. She doesn’t recognize me. She’s terrified.
“They mistook her for a goddamned Jew,” the upstairs neighbor says bitterly.
I walk west, across Prenzlauer Allee, then begin to run ahead. Just as I’d guessed, flames are curling out the windows of the Rykestraße synagogue, releasing a thick black smoke. Firemen have arrived and are blasting water inside. A police captain from the station next door has taken charge and his officers are holding back a crowd of about a hundred.
“Let the damn thing burn down!” shouts a Nazi Youth. Around him are at least a dozen of his colleagues and four storm troopers. One with a thick mustache still carries a can of gasoline, and he makes no effort to hide it. All of them are in a back-patting, good-humored mood.
“Let it turn to ash!” another of the boys shouts.
An old man with pajama bottoms showing under his overcoat grabs his arm. “I live two houses away. You want my home to go up in flames too?”
“Fuck off!” the Nazi Youth replies, wriggling free.
Turning to the woman next to me, I ask, “Is anyone trapped inside?”
“I don’t know,” she tells me.
Her husband looks at me angrily, so I walk away and look for Isaac, Rini, and the Munchenbergs, but the only Jewish person I recognize is Herr Wachlenberg, the baker at the River Jordan. At the corner of TresckowStraße, he’s been forced down to all fours by Gestapo officers. I’m only twenty paces away. I should run to him, but terror has gripped my gut and I dare not move. A Gestapo officer orders him to crawl on his hands and knees. A small group laughs caustically.
A big man in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets and an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, steps forward and kicks Herr Wachlenberg in his belly. With a grunt, the baker falls on his side, moaning. He brings his knees up by his head protectively.
It’s the assailant’s hands in his pockets I’ll never forget—as if breaking a Jew’s ribs is a casual thing. As easy as lighting his cigarette, which he does while standing over the wounded man.
Herr Wachlenberg spots me as I stride toward him. Giving me a panicked look, his eyes black with dread, he shakes his head. I can hear his thoughts easily enough: Don’t risk it!
I’ll sketch and even paint my feelings dozens of times in subsequent years, though I never get them right. Maybe only Hieronymus Bosch could do justice to that burning atmosphere of hate and cruelty.
Trembling with rage, I reach for Herr Wachlenberg’s shoulder to try to tug him to his feet.
“Get away from the dog!” I hear a man shout.
I’ll never be certain what happens next. As if God Himself takes hold of me—with no time passing, in between the ticks of a clock—I find myself thrown back onto the cobbles, the air ripped from my chest. Has a Gestapo officer struck me in the gut? Or was it the man with his hands in his pockets?
I’ve skinned both my hands badly and am fighting for air. An old woman with a tangle of gray hair is leaning down toward me. Behind her I can see the night sky. When did the sun go down? Maybe that’s why I’m so cold. And where is Hansi?
“You’ll be all right,” she tells me.
From behind, I feel pressure on my shoulders, and soon I’m sitting up again. Then I see Isaac’s worried face.
“What happened?” I ask him.
“I’m not sure. I just got here. I was hoping you’d stayed at home. You’ll never learn, will you?” He kisses the top of my head, then tries to lift me up, but I’m too dizzy.
“Just let me sit here for a minute.”
After I catch my breath, he manages to get me to my feet. My legs are cold and numb, so I lean on him. He notices that my right palm is bleeding and pulls out a splinter of glass. Taking out his handkerchief, he ties it around my hand.
The smell of smoke brings me back to myself. “Herr Wachlenberg … where is he?” I ask, and I look around without spotting him.
“Sophie, we’re going home,” he replies sternly.
“Take me to his bakery first.”
Isaac keeps his arm behind my waist to prop me up. Onlookers curse us. A bit of luck under the circumstances, because if they knew what we do in bed, they’d murder us instead. I recognize some of the shouting people—a butcher named Mueller from whom Mama used to buy sausages, a blond woman who’d always sit in one of the front pews at church, a bearded businessman who walks his white whippet on Marienburger Straße …
How could I ever have thought that everyone in my neighborhood was a good person at heart? What illusions children carry!
The River Jordan is all broken glass and splintered wood, but that makes no difference now; dangling out the first-floor window, just above the bakery—stripped naked, his head in a noose and a piece of bread stuffed in his mouth—is Herr Wachlenberg.
Another image I will try to sketch and fail. Part of my collection of half-finished pictures.
Professor Munchenberg answers our knocks and tells us that he and his wife are fine, and that she’s trying to fall back to sleep. The radio is on at a low volume. “Nothing will ever be the same now,” he tells me in a resigned voice. “Though maybe that’s a good thing.”
When we reach the landing outside Isaac’s apartment, a man, thin and pale, with short, unkempt gray hair, is sitting on his heels in the corner. He’s wearing a long white nightshirt but is naked from the waist down. He holds his own left arm, which is bleeding near the elbow, and his head jerks, as though in spasms. One of his eyes stares at nothing, the other darts around, seemingly in search of a fluttering butterfly. I recognize him as the man I’ve seen walking on the arm of an elegant young woman in the garden at the center of Wörther Platz. They have a bouncy, brown-and-white Shetland sheepdog who smells like an old pillow and whose name is Ringelblume, German for Marigold. I know, because Hansi insists on petting her whenever we spot them.
“Who’s there?” he whispers.
“It’s me, Isaac.” He offers his hand, slowly, tenderly, as if this foundling might run off.
“I hear other breathing,” the man says suspiciously.
“A friend. A young woman named Sophie.”
He shudders, so Isaac takes another step forward and touches his cheek, which makes the man seize Isaac’s hand. He gently steps the old tailor’s fingertips over his closed eyes and lips. “That is you, isn’t it?”
“Beethoven is even beautiful in Braille,” Isaac replies, as if it’s a sentence in code.
The man laughs in a relieved burst. “How many years ago did I tell you that?” he questions.
“Too long.” Isaac helps him to his feet.
“There was no time to dress,” the man says, crossing his hands over his private parts. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be silly. I helped your mother change your diapers when you were a baby. I’ll get you some clothes as soon as we get inside.” Isaac nods for me to open the door and leads the poor man forward, but then, suddenly pale, he asks in a fearful voice, “Where’s your cello?”
“Back at the apartment, smashed.”
“Damn those bastards! I’ll go for it as soon as I make you comfortable.”
“No, leave it for now.”
“And Ringelblume?”
“In my wardrobe hiding. I locked her in there as soon as the Nazis started shouting for me. She’ll be fine. I gave her a bowl of water.”
I reach for Isaac’s shoulder, hopefulness in my expression. Smiling as though presenting me with a treasure, he says, “Yes, Sophele, this is Benjamin Mannheim.”
And that’s when the tears I’ve been holding back flood me.
After Isaac bolts the door and brings out a bottle of schnapps, we sit together in his living room, our guest in a pullover and pair of trousers that I’ve fetched for him, both far too big. He doesn’t want slippers. “I want to be able to wiggle my toes,” he says, laughing as he demonstrates. “They’re proof that I’m still alive. I thought I was a dead man.”
Mr Mannheim is a bit giddy, and as if to prove it, his one real eye keeps dancing around.
It’s chilly in the apartment, so I’ve draped a crocheted throw rug over my shoulders and given a blanket to Mr Mannheim in case he needs it. I’m sitting cross-legged on a cushion in front of our guest, staring up at him. He and Isaac sit close together on the sofa.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I tell him excitedly. “I’ve wanted to meet you for years. I’ve seen you many times in Wörther Platz, but I didn’t know you were you.”
“I hope I’m not a disappointment,” he replies with amused lips.
“Of course not.”
I study his slender face. Another Jewish man who doesn’t eat enough. Berlin must have 20,000. A long, painful-looking scar leads from his right eyebrow across his forehead, then down to his left ear. “You play beautifully,” I tell him.
He bows his head gracefully. “Thank you.”
“So, don’t keep me in suspense, what happened to you?” Isaac asks him.
“I counted four voices. They smashed the cello, and some crockery, and then they led me out to the street and spun me around so that I lost track of direction. They told me to find my way home, and that when I did, they’d have a gift waiting for me. I suspected their present might be a bullet, so I sat down on the sidewalk until I could get my balance back. They didn’t like that, and one of them whacked me hard on my left arm with what must have been a plank of wood.” He holds his hand up and grimaces. “It might be broken.”
“I’ll call a doctor,” Isaac tells him.
“Is he Jewish?” Mr Mannheim asks anxiously.
“Yes.”
“Examining my arm could get him into trouble.”
“Listen, Benni, I won’t tell the Gestapo if you don’t.”
Our guest laughs, and Isaac telephones Dr Löwenstein, but his wife says he was arrested a few hours earlier. She doesn’t know where he’s been taken.
“I’m afraid things are worse than I feared,” he tells us. “Mrs Löwenstein says that Jews are being beaten up and hauled off by mobs and brownshirts in some other areas of the city.”
Mr Mannheim closes his eyes and leans back as though into memories. And for the first time, I wonder if Jews carry a genetic vestige of 2,000 years of persecution in their very bodies.
“Sophele, would you be kind enough to make us some tea?” Isaac asks me, and when I nod, he adds, “And bring in some matzo. I’m famished all of a sudden.”
“Because you don’t eat anything during the day!”
“Do you have a Gentile doctor?” Isaac asks Mr Mannheim as I leave the room.
“Almost,” our guest replies, bending over and folding cuffs on his trousers to keep them from hitting the floor. “He’s three-quarters Christian, which means he can still practice medicine with two hands and one leg.”
“He must do a lot of hopping.”
Two Jewish men laughing gleefully in the middle of a pogrom. I don’t know how they do it.
“I’ll call him in the morning,” Mr Mannheim says.
“For now, the schnapps will help take away some of the pain,” Isaac says. “Drink up.”
Isaac and he talk while I boil water and brew our tea. I also fetch some aspirin. Mr Mannheim takes the pills out of my hand with delicate but quick movements, his hand like a pecking bird. Then he reaches up to my cheek. “May I feel your face?”
I sit next to him on the sofa and close my eyes as he sculpts me into his memory. His purposeful touch carries me back to the day I met Vera.
“What happened next, Benni?” Isaac asks.
Mr Mannheim takes a greedy gulp of his tea. “The men ran off and I stumbled over here. You know, Isaac, I thought I’d managed to avoid this sort of … of attack. An old colleague of mine from the conservatory is at Gestapo headquarters now. He’s still a reasonable violinist. On occasion we play duets at his apartment. He’s protected me against the denunciations until now.”
“What denunciations?” I ask.
“Neighbors have been complaining about my playing.” He holds up his bad arm again. “They’ll be overjoyed I’m out of commission. And my poor cello …” He grimaces.
“I’ll go get it,” Isaac declares, standing up. “No, don’t!” Mr Mannheim orders, thrusting up his hands. “You can go in the morning. Whoever is there waiting for me will get bored and leave by then.”
“All right, if you think it best.” Isaac squats by our guest. “I’m glad you had the good sense to come to me,” he says, and he leans his head against the cellist’s. Glancing at me, smiling to keep tears away, he adds, “Benni was a very good friend of my son’s.”
“Isaac, I need to call my children,” Mr Manheim tells him. “May I use the phone?”
I walk him to the bedroom, so he can have some privacy. Having him on my arm makes me tingle. He walks daintily and slowly, like a mantis. I realize with a start that he may not be blind by birth. While he’s speaking with his children, Isaac tells me, “No, he was in a car accident. He lost his right eye and most of his vision in his left one. The poor boy was a pile of broken bones!”
Mr Mannheim’s son and daughter are both safe. It’s my turn to make calls next. After all our years of separation, I still know Rini’s phone number by heart, but no one answers. We can’t call Marianne and K-H because they’re deaf, and we can’t risk going to their apartment at the moment. Roman is safe because he has recently left for Italy. As for Dr Hassgall, his teenaged daughter answers his phone and tells me he’s gone to the King David School to stand guard, so I call his office, but there’s no answer. Else is safe at home. She answers my call in a drowsy voice; she was unaware that Berlin was in the middle of a pogrom and was sound asleep. But she’s thankful I called so that she can try to reach her Jewish students. I tell her I’ll call Volker. He answers in a terrified voice, speaking gibberish at his usual breakneck speed. As best I can decipher, both his parents were taken away near midnight.
“Listen, Volker, talk slowly. Do you have an aunt or uncle in the neighborhood?”
“No.” He repeats to me how the Gestapo came for his parents. Apparently, one of the men punched his father. It’s all a bit hard to decipher, since he can’t stop weeping.
“Don’t get off the line,” I tell him, and I explain to Isaac that I have to go fetch Volker.
“You are not leaving this apartment!” he orders, jumping up and glaring at me.
“Well, someone is going to have to get him! I’m not leaving him alone.”
“I’ll go,” he assures me.
“No! One look at your identity card and they’ll know you’re a Jew.”
“We’ll send a taxi,” Benni interjects.
“What do you mean?” I ask, thinking, This man is an idiot!
“I have a taxi owner who takes me wherever I want to go. Where does Volker live?”
“In Gesundbrunnen, near St George’s Hospital.”
“Good, not too far. Tell the boy to get ready. And have him leave a note for his parents.”
A taxi in the middle of a pogrom? Such are the contradictions of Berlin these days.
Rainer Kallmeyer—I’ll write down the taxi driver’s name in my diary that night, and also note how he brought us a boiled chicken, sent by his wife. Within half an hour, he’s knocking on our door; he’s walked the trembling boy up to Isaac’s apartment. Volker rushes into my arms, nearly knocking me over.
Isaac then gives me the number of the Jewish Old Age Home; we fear it’s been set on fire. But the night nurse who answers is as calm as can be. “Storm troopers came and went without doing too much damage,” she assures me.
A chicken never tasted so good. Handing Volker a wing, I say, “Let’s rake some leaves,” which makes him try to smile. Mostly he gazes down into his fear, so I keep kicking his foot; I don’t want him vanishing into himself. Near three in the morning, the boy steers Benni into the guest room so the two of them can get some sleep. I go back home to tell my father I’m fine, but he’s fast asleep in his armchair. Hansi is up, so I tell him where I’ll be and that Volker is safe, then tuck him in and return to Isaac. We talk until dawn, sitting under the covers, holding hands. His words of outrage spill between us. When we speak of Benni, he tells me that after the accident, he stopped seeing people. “He likes his privacy, but maybe now that his hands have memorized your face, we can visit him from time to time.”
The next day, Isaac frees Benni’s exuberant Shetland sheepdog, Ringelblume, from his wardrobe, and retrieves his cello. Its neck has been snapped off, then broken in half. “I can have another one made, and the sound will be perfect,” Benni tells us, scoffing at the difficulty, which relieves us all.
What he doesn’t say is that he has no money to pay for the repair, and none of us will ever hear him play another note. He hides his despair well. I suppose he feels that we hardly need more bad news, which is true enough. Or maybe he already understands that the time for men like him in Germany has come to an end.
The Morgenpost describes the pogrom as a “spontaneous day of vengeance” for the death of vom Rath. Every Jewish shop in Berlin has been ransacked and destroyed, and all the synagogues have been damaged or burned to the ground, including the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße, the largest in the world. Thousands of Berlin Jews have been arrested and reportedly taken to a new concentration camp called Sachsenhausen, though the rumor is that dozens have already been shot or hanged.
After the war, we’ll learn that 7,500 Jewish shops were smashed to pieces in Germany on what comes to be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass. Nazis and their supporters turn 1,600 synagogues to ruins of splinters, shards, and ash. Walking through Berlin over the next days, seeing the Jewish shopkeepers and children sweeping up piles of broken glass and shattered wood, I believe that we’ve survived the worst the government can do. Yes, I am still that naïve.
A melted streetlamp on Kantstraße, curling toward the ground like a weeping tree in a surrealist nightmare, is the strangest sight I see that week. But it’s the brown bloodstains I spot all over Berlin—and that can never now come off our sidewalks—that seep hot into my dreams.
Even so, the pogrom is not the sign Isaac has been waiting for. How can he be certain? “I would sense the sky descending and the waters beginning to rise,” he tells me.
“Please, Isaac, I’m too exhausted for poetry,” I plead.
“That’s all I have,” he says, and as he turns his pockets out, he says, “Prose is powerless now, and, in any case, I’ve none left.”
Benni’s daughter, Deborah, comes over the next morning, full of thanks, and she leads her father home. Isaac heads out to check on K-H, Marianne, and countless other friends.
On the way to school that morning, I take Volker and Hansi to the Rykestraße Synagogue to show them the wasteland the Nazis want to create out of what was once our culture. The boys and I don’t speak. Silent outrage is not enough, but it is all we have.
When we stop by Rini’s apartment, a man I’ve never seen before answers my knocks and tells me that the Bloch family moved out last July. None of the neighbors knows where they’ve gone.
I’m too late for Rini by four months. Each day I let fall between us is a weight on my heart.
Only a third of the students come to school that day. Having stood guard all night, Dr Hassgall naps in his office after giving his morning classes. I call Volker’s aunt in Frankfurt that afternoon, but she won’t be able to fetch him until the weekend, so I bring him home. My father has unglued himself from Greta because of the pogrom and returns from work while Volker and Hansi are concentrating on a jigsaw puzzle of a muscular athlete by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. It was a present from Papa.
“What’s that Jewish boy doing here?” my father whisper-screams at me in the kitchen.
Having predicted his disapproval, I have my reply ready: “Trying to find some fragments of Breker’s balls, I’d guess.”
“That’s not funny, Sophie. Get rid of him.”
“You get rid of him,” I say, calling his bluff.
“Volker!” my father hollers, and the boy comes into the kitchen, all eagerness. “Listen, son,” Papa tells him. “You’ve got to go.”
That’s proof enough that there’s no bottom to his evil, as far as I’m concerned. Volker gazes down, petrified. “What my father means,” I tell him softly, “is that we’ve had a small change of plans. I’ll be going over to Mr Mannheim’s apartment later this evening to make certain he’s all right. Could you stay there until Saturday when your aunt can come and get you?”
“Yes, that’s all right,” he replies, his face brightening.
“We’ll leave in an hour—after supper.”
As soon as the boy is back at his puzzle, Papa says, “You think I’m a monster, but I’m only protecting our family. You’ll realize that someday.”
If I were a man, I’d probably deck him with a punch as my reply, but I limit myself to the essential, “That beautiful boy’s parents have been arrested by your friends. If it weren’t for Hansi, I’d leave you.”
He opens his arms wide. “Be my guest—go whenever you want.” And he grins so as to stick the knife in deep enough to hit bone.
Mr Mannheim is surprised that I’ve brought Volker to him, but his guest room is free and Ringelblume gives her approval, licking the boy as if he were made of marzipan. If only all our problems were solved so easily.
On Saturday, Isaac shows me a new government threat in the newspaper, “Jews, abandon all hope. Our net is so fine that there is no hole through which you can slip.”
The threat’s reference to the inscription on the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno—abandon all hope—makes me wonder where all our good Christians have been hiding. Shouldn’t at least thirty million of them have come out in the streets by now to protest against the pogrom against their savior’s people? Except for the preachings of Bernard Lichtenberg, the provost of St Hedwig’s Cathedral, we haven’t heard more than an occasional squeak from our priests and ministers since Reverend Niemöller’s march in Dahlem nearly a year before, when 115 demonstrators were arrested. Apparently 115 is just the right number to tie a gag on the next 29,999,885. Or maybe the pious prayers of German Christians have always been lies.
So it is that I lose hope that any organized group will fight for the Jews. And now that the Nazis have destroyed synagogues and shops, only Jewish homes can be next. That is the meaning of Kristallnacht to me, and I tell Isaac he’ll have to get out as soon as possible.
“Where would you like me to go?” he asks, turning away from the radio to challenge me.
“Istanbul.”
Giving me one of his Biblical frowns, he leans forward and raises the volume.
The frigidity of his reactions makes me curse him at times. Weeks go by without our conversing as friends or making love. Even little annoyances now seem like acute forms of torture. For instance, he leaves trails of ash and pipe tobacco everywhere, even in his pajamas and slippers. I see in his eyes that he still loves me, but the me he cherishes has to make no demands or risk being locked out. I feel cornered by him, my father, and my country, backed up to the imprisoned center of my own powerlessness. I crave Vera’s rudeness, which I can see now was an effective barrier against complacency. I fantasize about leaving for Antwerp all the time.
At school now, I often pause in the middle of a lesson and wonder why I’m discussing how to draw the slope of a neck or the limbs of a tree. At times, I simply can’t fathom the importance of teaching. A stale taste is in my mouth nearly all the time. Maybe that’s what’s left of my sense of humor. Or a symptom of my continuing lack of sleep. Once, while I’m preparing supper for Hansi, I find my old pillbox and discover six luminals left. They’re tempting, but Hansi is watching me with worried eyes, so I dump them down the toilet for the mutant albino crocodiles, who are also probably suffering sleeplessness these days. I let him do the honors of flushing.
After the war, dozens of Americans will tell me in their ever-so-earnest way that they’ll never understand how Jews and their supporters could have failed to flee in time. We had people depending on us, I always want to shout. Is that so hard to understand?
And then there are reasons that are harder to put into words …
We were waiting for a whole country to wake up. We were offended and wanted an apology. We thought we could outlast them. We didn’t want to drop the novel in the middle.
Those replies sound either pitiful or laughable after watching newsreels of rag-doll corpses being tossed into ditches inside the death camps, so I keep my lips sealed tight.
* * *
Rioters destroy K-H’s studio and steal his cameras during Kristallnacht. The next day, two Gestapo officers come to his apartment and interrogate Marianne. He has gone to the Fasanenstraße synagogue to photograph its smoldering shell, but she tells her guests that he has gone hiking in the Tegeler Forest and won’t be back for several days. After they leave, Marianne grabs Werner and leads him on a circuitous route to Fasanenstraße in case they’re being followed. She finds K-H taking portraits of the rabbi, who is holding a melted brass Exit sign that looks as if it slipped off a canvas by Salvador Dali. K-H picks up Werner, and as a family they head to the Savigny Platz Station. They sleep at K-H’s cousin’s apartment that night and come to Isaac’s home the next morning to get the key to his converted boathouse on the Havel River. Unfortunately, they have meager savings and almost nothing valuable to sell.
Isaac gives them all the cash he keeps hidden in a pair of moldy old Moroccan slippers, and I fetch the amethyst brooch I inherited from my mother, but Marianne refuses to take it.
“Cantor Kretschmer told us we were sisters that time we ducked into the Kaiserstraße synagogue,” I remind her. “And sisters protect each other. Besides, it’s only jewelry.”
Beautiful words, but my mother whispers to me disapprovingly as I hand it to her.
I manage to reach Rolf over the weekend. “Sophie, thank God, you and Isaac are safe,” he tells me. “And thank God, too, that Heidi wasn’t here to see what’s become of her beloved Berlin.”
He doesn’t ask after Vera, and I don’t tell him anything.
As if to re-earn our nickname for him, Hitler soon fines the German Jewish communities one billion marks for the destruction of their own shops and temples, estimated at a fifth of the combined wealth of the 200,000 Jews still living in Germany. Over the next months, they’re also forbidden from going to museums, concert halls, and parks, and their businesses are given to Aryans. The government section of the city south of Unter den Linden becomes off-limits. Their driver’s licenses are taken away, too.
“Rotz—snot—doesn’t drive, so why should Roth!” The punchline to a joke circulating around Berlin at the time. No, the Nazis will never be funny, but they try on occasion …
Juden verboten. Almost all the shops along Prenzlauer Allee now have such signs in the windows, though a popular variation is, No Jews or Dogs. But the winning sign is at Lehmann’s Florist Shop: Dead Jews Accepted As Fertilizer.
My father goes back to spending nearly all his time with Greta. Once, Hansi writes on his pad, “Is Papa married to her?”
It’s then that I realize they may very well have had a wedding without telling us. “Maybe,” I reply. “Would it bother you if he was?”
“Not much,” he writes. “But I think it would upset Mama.”
So he still considers what she would think. Just like me.
Tonio’s letters to me from that autumn and winter speak of his pride in being able to help Hitler create an empire of German culture in Europe. He does not mention Kristallnacht; maybe he’s certain I’d never see him again if he voiced his opinion.
One day in early February 1939, K-H and Marianne disappear. At the boathouse, Isaac finds no evidence of a break-in or a struggle, and the hurried note they leave says only, “It is time for us to go. We’ll try to contact you soon. Thank you for everything.” Over the next weeks, we get no call or letter. Isaac is sure they don’t send news because our mail is probably being read and our phones tapped.
Later that month, when Jews are ordered to turn in all their valuables, Isaac begins selling his artwork, though in this buyer’s market he receives almost nothing for them, even the Chagall. He holds on to my favorite, Otto Dix’s portrait of Iwar von Lücken, but he also sells three early Grosz drawings. In all, he earns enough for four months of groceries if he eats at his usual mouse-like pace.
By that time, most of the 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps on Kristallnacht have been returned to their homes on the condition that they emigrate. Volker’s father and mother are among them, so the boy can return from his aunt and uncle’s house in Frankfurt.
Soon after that, Dr Hassgall tells me that Zarco Industries is sinking fast, so he has ordered a pay cut for all the workers, including Isaac, who has received a modest monthly stipend since the sale of his business. I also suffer a twenty percent reduction of my school salary. Happily, Papa keeps getting raises, and he’s up for a big promotion. I ask him for more household money than I need and spend what’s leftover on Isaac.
Jewish schools start to be shut down on the 1st of April, which is a lopsided piece of good news for Dr Hassgall, since seven new students enroll with us. Then, the father of one of our old students writes a protest letter to him. The man—Lothar Strauss—claims that there are too many Jewish pupils and that we are no longer able to provide a “healthy, German atmosphere.”
Dr Hassgall invites Herr Strauss and all the other parents—Jews and Gentile alike—to a meeting in order to talk over school policy, but the disgruntled man proves himself a coward and refuses to show up to face the people he is most injuring. Only when the Jews are excluded does he come, along with seven other fathers and twelve mothers. He gives a showy, stiff-armed “Heil Hitler” to the other parents.
Papa is not there; fearing that he’d remove Hansi from school, I tossed his invitation into the garbage.
Dr Hassgall conducts the tense session with his dignified, nineteenth-century demeanor until Mr Strauss says that our headmaster has been threatening the education of his Aryan majority simply to please some rich Bolshevik Jews.
“Give me the names of these rich Bolsheviks!” Dr Hassgall challenges him.
The first parent Mr Strauss names is Volker’s father, who has lost his job as a supervisor at a candy-making factory and is living on handouts from relatives and what he can make at contract bridge tournaments. The lout goes on to name all the other Jewish parents. When he’s finished, Dr Hassgall replies, “I’ll give you this—you have a fine memory for names.” His admiring and amused tone takes us off-guard, which is why several fathers and mothers gasp when he adds, “Now, Herr Strauss, if you don’t leave my school immediately, I’m going to fetch my old army pistol and put a bullet in what’s left of your brain.”
Else, shaken by a tremor of emotion, grips my arm. If I were still the wayward danger-seeker I’d been as a girl, I’d be thrilled that we seem to have entered a German Western just prior to the big shootout, but my nerves are always one raised voice from panic these days and it’s all I can do to keep from running out of the room. For better or worse, Herr Strauss refuses to write himself into the gunfight, and he stomps out after telling Dr Hassgall he’s pulling his son out of the school. Five sets of parents decide to do the same.
After the meeting, Dr Hassgall apologizes to the teachers for his outburst. His shirt collar is soaked and he can’t get enough breath. I fetch him his bottle of Russian vodka from his office and hand it to him with a kiss on the cheek. “I know it cost you to get angry, but it was worth it!”
Vera writes every two weeks. As could be predicted, she hates Antwerp. She has made no friends and tells us that Andre is sick of sharing his apartment with her, and the only thing more wretched than the Flemish sense of humor is the cuisine. “Everything tastes like old cat food,” she alleges.
When I read Hansi her letter, he writes on his pad, “How does she know what old cat food tastes like?”
We laugh and laugh; hysteria, too, accompanies my long slide into depression.
Vera has found employment making men’s suits for a Jewish tailor who pays her a decent wage and lets her work at home. Andre is designing ads for a toothpaste manufacturer. He scribbles brief greetings on the final page of her letters and always tries to be humorous.
Tonio writes once a month. He is still in Sudetenland, though he gives me hints that he might soon be leaving for Prague. I fear that he will end up murdering Jews. In my first letter to him, I beg him to make sure the Czech Jews are treated respectfully in his presence. “If not for me, then for all our fond memories of Raffi.”
In mid-June 1939, Isaac becomes disoriented. My first clue is that he gets the pages of Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts badly mixed up and pleads for my help in ordering them.
“I can’t read Hebrew letters,” I remind him.
“My memory must be going,” he replies, knocking himself in the forehead.
He works alone at reassembling the manuscripts, his hands shaking from the strain. His crinkled brow and constant smoking mean he’s worried that he’ll never locate the incantation he needs inside the jumble. Forensic accounting is one thing; forensic kabbalah, quite another.
In his search, he’s now employing a medieval system called gematria, which takes advantage of the numerical values of Hebrew letters, all of which are also numbers. He calculates the sums of key words, then looks for words or expressions of equal, double, or half their value and tries to interpret what these correspondences mean. On a hunch, he’s also translating Berekiah’s references to the Sixth and Seventh Gates into Aramaic to analyze hidden possibilities.
Toward the end of that month, he asks me if I want to meet his son. “Your son?”
I sense us both caught in a trap that’s been waiting for months. “Where … where is he?” I ask hesitantly.
“At school, of course. We’ll meet him when classes let out.”
I decide to see how far afield his mind has wandered. As we near the Jewish high school on Große Hamburger Straße, he finally realizes he’s made a mistake. “My son’s dead, isn’t he?” he asks me, his face blanching.
“Yes, he died in the war.”
“Oh, Sophele, I don’t know what’s happening to me.” He reaches out a straining hand.
The poor man is so scared that he falls to his knees onto the Auguststraße sidewalk. On reaching home, I call Dr Löwenstein, who has recently been released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He comes over that evening, and he’s gotten so thin that his tweed coat hangs around him like a clown suit.
He takes Isaac’s pulse, listens to his heart, and asks him a series of questions: What year is it? How old are you? If it was four o’clock three hours ago, what time is it now?
Isaac gives the correct replies. “And what would you like to happen to the Chancellor of Germany?” Dr Löwenstein finally asks.
Dryly, Isaac replies, “His eyeballs should drop out, and his ears fall off, and pack horses should eat them.”
The doctor turns to me with a grin. “The good news is he’s got his mind back. The bad news is he curses like a Yid.”
Dr Löwenstein has a long talk with Isaac about his need to take things easier. “And you’ve got to get out of this apartment more often!” he orders him. “Your bedroom smells like old socks. I bet you don’t even stick your head out the window more than once a week.”
Isaac agrees, but he still never leaves the apartment. Until, that is, I begin secretly putting half a luminal in his supper, which stops the occasional tremors in his hands. He even enjoys the taste of food again and puts on a few pounds, which means, among other things, that his cock gets hard when I touch it. He starts going back to work two mornings a week. On my absolute insistence, he studies his manuscripts at a more measured pace.
In July, the rhetoric in our newspapers against England and France turns virulent. We hear frequent radio bulletins about supposed attacks on Germans living in Poland. My favorite is of a German baker’s widow allegedly raped by a rabbi and a gang of Warsaw Jews. It says a great deal about the Volk that they believe this sort of fiction. Germany As the Victim—that’s the way Dr Goebbels has decided to sell the coming all-out war, and judging by public opinion, he’s having good success.
Tonio reaches Prague in early August. From the way he describes the friendliness he meets everywhere, you would think his tank is made of chrysanthemums. He never mentions abuses against Czech Jews, but in stiff, formal language, he refers to “enemies of the Reich who are being made to pay for spreading vicious lies about the Fatherland and its goals.”
On the 21st of August, Benni Mannheim’s daughter, Deborah, comes over to inform us that her father has committed suicide. Isaac reaches behind him to steady himself and, finding nothing but air, crashes backward against the wall.
Deborah says that Benni took a kitchen knife to his wrists while lying in the bathtub. She sits in front of us, her hands clutched in her lap, and she explains in a lost voice about the cost of repairing his cello being beyond their means, and of his visit to the British Embassy, where he was told that it was unlikely, given his blindness, that he’d get a visa for England, Palestine, or anywhere else.
After she’s gone, and after I’ve cried over all the Bach, Mozart, and Telemann we’ll never hear again, and over Benni’s talent about to be buried under the earth forever, and over all the nights I spent listening to him and wondering who this miracle man was, I ask Isaac, “Why didn’t he come to ask us for help?”
He hangs his head. “I don’t have any answers anymore.”
“And why in a bathtub?”
“No stains. The blood … it goes down the drain with the water. Since his accident, he feared being a burden.”
* * *
“I understand now,” Isaac says, putting down his newspaper. Three days have passed since Benni’s suicide and Hitler and Stalin have reached a pact of nonaggression.
“What do you understand?” I ask.
Isaac is in his pajamas; he hasn’t dressed or shaved since Benni’s funeral. Our mirrors are covered with black cloth.
“Saul was from the tribe of Benjamin,” he states definitively.
“I don’t get it.”
“In the First Book of Samuel, Saul kills himself with his own sword. But in the Second Book of Samuel, Saul tries to take his own life and fails, so he is given a death-blow by an enemy of Israel, by an Amalekite.” He gives me a hard look. “Benni took his own life, but he was also murdered by the Nazis. His death is a sign from Samuel and Saul that the waters have risen. And this pact between Hitler and Stalin … it is the sky descending. Hitler will be free to make war on England and France and America. First Binah will shatter, then Hokhmah, and finally Kether Elyon. Wisdom and insight will disappear from our world. The Crown of God will lose all meaning. Both inside and outside are collapsing. God is about to recoil into Himself.”
“But Benni’s suicide can’t have such important consequences. He was just one man.”
“Sophele, you once told me that whether Benni knew it or not, his message was that the world has chords whose sound and structure obey physical laws, and scales that cannot be altered no matter what Hitler might say or do. You remember? You had reached a great truth that day, but Benni’s death … Silence will descend over all our voices now. The physical laws are coming undone.”
“Isaac, I think you need to stay calm,” I say, fearing he’ll become disoriented again. “You’re finding symbolism that simply isn’t there.”
I expect him to shout, or to rush to Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts, but he walks to me with a warm radiance in his eyes that I haven’t seen in months. “Sophele, I am going to leave you now. I will not be able to love you the way you deserve, but I want you to know I am aware that I’m failing you. And that I’m sorry.” He takes my hands and shakes them playfully. “I also want you to know that I haven’t lost my marbles.” He grins. “At least, not any more than a few.”
“You’re worrying me,” I tell him.
He presses his lips gently to my eyes and then my lips. “I’ll be gone from you for as long as it takes, but don’t be concerned. I feel strong now that I’ve seen the sign. I have been washed seven times in the River Jordan, and I have seen the desert blossom, and I am clean again.” He caresses my cheek. “Bless you for leading me back to myself. But there is one thing I do want from you.”
“What?”
“You have to leave Germany. The breaking of the vessels … If you stay here, you’ll be killed. I want you to go to Istanbul. Berekiah, in his last manuscript … Wait, I want you to hear what he says.” Isaac fetches Berekiah’s seventh manuscript, an account of the Lisbon massacre of 1506, and translates part of the last page for me into German: “‘The European kings and their hateful bishops will never stop dreaming of the Jews. They will never allow you and your children to live. Never! Sooner or later, in this century or five centuries hence, they will come for you or your descendants. So face Constantinople and Jerusalem and start walking. Cast out Christian Europe from your heart and never look back!’” He gives me a resolute look meant to enforce his meaning, then carries the manuscript back to his desk.
“But Berekiah wrote that in the sixteenth century,” I protest.
“It doesn’t matter,” he replies, exasperated. “His words are still valid. You must go to my cousins in Istanbul. You must leave Christian Europe. Take Vera and Andre with you. Will you do that for me?”
“Only if you come with us.”
“I can’t. I must stay here in Berlin. I need to be here to do any good.”
“Then I won’t leave. You’ll need me to look after you and …”
“I can live on next to nothing for longer than you think—for years if I need to. How is an old Jewish man like a camel?” he asks.
“No jokes!” I warn him. “And I can’t go. I have to consider Hansi.”
“He’s doing much better now. He gets around the city all by himself, and he has friends. If all goes well, you can come back here after a year or two. And if the worst happens, I’ll send him to you. I promise.”
“I’ll need time to prepare Hansi for my going. I’ll need to stay at least a year.” That’s a lie; what I really believe is that Isaac will either be too exhausted to fight me or completely mad by then.
“A year is out of the question!” he declares. He clamps his pipe in his mouth to certify that decision.
“It’s now the end of August. Give me nine months, till May. We’ll celebrate Purim and Carnival. We’ll have Passover together and then I’ll flee for your Promised Land.”
“No. Three months maximum.”
“That’s too soon for all I’ll need to do. Give me six.”
“Only if you agree to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice if I sense the worst is happening.”
“All right.”
“And you promise not to back out at the last minute?”
“I swear. But I want something from you in return.”
“What?” His eyes open wide with amused curiosity. Maybe he thinks I’ll make him promise to have sex with me as often as I want.
“I want your child,” I tell him, which makes his jaw drop and his pipe fall. As I retrieve it, I add, “I’ll leave Germany only if I am carrying your baby.”
He raises a hand to his cheek in horror. “A child … ? But I’m … I’m seventy years old!”
“Abraham had Isaac when he was a hundred.”
“I’m no Abraham.”
He flaps his hands at me, but I catch them and grip them tight. “I won’t go otherwise. Those are my terms. Take it or leave it.”
My secret belief is that he’ll never send me away if I’m pregnant with his child. He sits on the bed and opens his arms to me. I lay my head on his lap, and he kisses me on the top of my head. I expect him to say no as gently as possible, but he never does.
“All right,” he finally agrees, “we’ll make a baby right away. And you’ll leave after you’ve missed one cycle of the moon.” Eyeing me purposefully and speaking as if it’s an order, he adds, “Even if six months aren’t up yet.”
“Two cycles,” I bargain. “To make sure I’m really pregnant.”
We shake on our agreement like gentlemen, and that afternoon Isaac writes a long letter in Ladino to his family in Istanbul. Isaac’s aunts and uncles are long dead, but he has several cousins and is particularly close to his Aunt Luna’s eldest son, Abraham. Only after he’s sent it does he warn me that he’s told his relatives I’m Jewish. “It’ll make life easier for you and the baby.”
On the 27th of August, our neighborhood superintendent distributes food-ration cards. Five days later, on the 1st of September, Germany invades Poland. Air-raid sirens go off across the city because France and Britain are rumored to have sent bombers to attack Berlin. Hansi and I take our emergency supplies into the shelter. These include his jigsaw puzzle of Michelangelo’s David and the cane that Rolf gave him. Isaac, the Munchenbergs, and our other Jewish neighbors are forced to sit in the corner, and most of them dare not even look at those of us in the Aryan section. When the all-clear sounds, the gray-uniformed warden instructs them to wait without talking for the Aryans to leave before they stand up.
We have our first blackout that night, and I rush out onto Prenzlauer Allee to see what Berlin looks like. No streetlamps, no neon signs, no car headlights. We are living now in a dark forest, and the moon above us is an eye. Prenzlauerberg and the Mitte, Schöneberg, Neukölln and Wedding, the KuDamm and Unter den Linden … Berlin has become the setting of a fairy tale, but is the story being told by the Opposite-Compass or by Isaac and me?