NILS SCHREIBER

Rejection

THE NIGHT THAT KRÖLLER turned down my story for being “premature,” there was hardly a thing in the apartment I managed not to stumble into. At last Holly had had enough of my childishness and I was forced to tell her. My certainty that Kröller was in the wrong perhaps failed to convince her, likewise my threats to take the story to another paper.

“You’d be gone then. You’d lose your job.”

She seemed worried for me then. A pleasing thought, to have someone worried for you. But of course in my anger I had looked right past her. What she was really thinking was that she should feel badly for me, for my frustration and sense of futility and injustice, but that in reality she didn’t quite. All the doubts she’d ever had about my pursuit of Franz came freshly into focus. She was unused to me being certain about anything, which was understandable, since I never was. It alarmed her. “But if it is early in the story…” she finally said.

And she said it a little sadly.

My mind wheeled around her. “With Herbert reimbursing, the thing’s already deflating! Do you want me to wait till the other papers get it on their own?”

“No, but what is the story?”

“The story is, someone embezzles millions out of a public trust.”

“What did he do with the money?”

“That comes out next. Either a trail of paper leads to the gas masks, or he’s cached the money away and whatever he got from Herbert was simply a kiss goodbye. Are you going to make me feel guilty about this?”

“No. But… I do think…I’m trying to think…of the consequences, that’s all. You publish, and a noble life gets smeared with shitty innuendo…”

“I didn’t do it! He did it!”

“For decent reasons, maybe.”

“The decent reasons will be there! I’m not out to crucify him! Listen, Holly, you haven’t been here, you don’t know. There’s been a taboo in the German press for years about the Jewish community and money. Somebody stole millions from a reparations fund a few years ago, it disappeared off the news pages in days. Such coverage, as they say, is not kosher.”

“But understandable?” I heard her question mark, so faint as to barely make an impression, a stamp made with only just enough ink.

“Of course, you mean our history, the desire not to revive slanders. But now it’s time to take the next step. We have to afford to be honest. We have to afford to be normal.”

Then she said the sort of thing which I knew embarrassed her to say, which surely she never thought she would hear herself say, and not only for its rhetorical flourish: “Maybe you think it’s one more irony, Nils, the philo-Semite writing the story that services anti-Semite agendas. But for all the millions who only see the headlines…and for all the people who just want some shred of justification, some bit of excuse, for what happened to the Jews here…”

“I can’t help them! They’re sick! They’re insane! I have to live for something better! We all do!”

Including Holly, I did not say, but of course she heard it anyway. Would she, after all, be an exception? What dose of self-pity or mortification gave her a free pass? Her boyfriend’s a reporter. Reporters report. If everyone’s lucky, they report the truth. When they do not, not when they do, is when the problems begin. Yes? No? Holly, please: yes or no?

She found herself shaking her head, a tablespoon in sorrow, a teaspoon in confusion. “I know. I know I’m wrong. But you’re hard, Nils. You’re really hard,” she said.

She raised her eyes to mine. It seemed a long time that we searched each other. But such searches can leave false impressions; they can be nothing more than holding actions, when two people don’t know what else to say or do.

Into this stalemate of the heart Holly spoke quietly. “Oksana said something once – I’ve never quite gotten it out of my head…probably because it was the only thing she said to me that I was sure was dead wrong…about you and her, you and Oksana…Two needy people, she said, shouldn’t ‘hook up’…she used that silly kids’ phrase, those silly kids’ phrases, like for once her ear was off… But you know her ear was never really off…Nils, I don’t know…”

She came close to me and tipped her head into my chest. I held her, but a strange resistance, which felt to be neither mine nor hers, but perhaps only some random magnetic field that had slipped in to fill the air between us, stopped my arms from drawing her in. Finally she stepped back. “Something’s off. It is, isn’t it? It’s gone…I don’t know where it’s gone.”

“Is it the baby? Your wanting a baby?” I said.

“No. You were right to say what you said. At least you were honest… And I was arrogant. Still am, I think, can’t stop, keep thinking, acting, I don’t know, like I’m this candle or something, this white candle, this moral candle. Nils, I know I’m not. In my best moments I know that… And I’m not your dark whore, either.”

“And I suppose I’m not as billed, either,” I said. “The good German, big-necked and rough-and-tumble, arriving just in time to save you and all of yours from the licking flames, repulse the butchering hoards from your door. I wish I could, really. But leaving aside the failings you’ve well-documented, the irony I’m terrified to abandon for more than a minute and all the rest – you’re not in any fire, the hoards are taking a rest.”

So we live with the shadows of others until we’re confused, and then we live happily with the confusion awhile, and then it clears.

The room seemed very small, like a room in an old slum, with cracked paint and a sagging bed, where an amnesiac wakes up.

Several weeks then passed, and my number one girl became her own again, while I searched for Franz Rosen up and down the boot of Italy until I found him. A lot of bribes in seaside towns and then there he was, in a printed silk shirt and incongruous dark shoes, on a patio with a patio drink overlooking the sea. I told him I was ready to publish, though not that I had little idea whether Kröller would go along. I showed him what I had. He read with detached interest, nodding here and there, correcting a detail or two I’d acquired in the weeks or months of his flight. The gas masks were back in the eastern warehouse by now. A five percent profit had been made. The war was over. My story was certainly stale. For a little while I imagined that his graciousness was due to the fact that he knew he had outrun me; the victor’s easy largesse. But it wasn’t that. It was more, I think, that he’d found in me someone he imagined to trust with the secret which harried him more relentlessly than I ever had.

Or, simply, it was a gift he chose to make to me. I wrote everything he told me. “A Scarcely Possible Life.” Kroller was pleased. He told me I’d written something at last that was more “human” than “political”. Well, fuck him. Fuck Kroller. There was only one critic I was interested in hearing from.

It was two weeks before a letter came, postmarked Velden am Moritzsee. “Dear Nils, I’m well enough. The house may soon be mine! I suppose ‘ours’ is the correct pronoun. Anja did some digging and the claim on the country house is apparently near the top of the bureaucrats’ pile. In the course of weeks that I’ve been coming out here, this thought has filled me alternately with dread and possibility. You used to call the two of us sociologists. But I believe I’ve become more an archaeologist, sifting through the ruins of the lives that bred me. I see I wrote, just a few sentences ago, ‘The house may soon be mine!’ But actually I doubt the exclamation mark is justified. I’ve moved out here full-time and am living with neurotics and paranoids in a dark, heavy house that as far as I can tell hasn’t even a stick of my parents’ furniture. Everything with the possible exception of the birdhouse is institutional, and GDR cheesy, even the refrigerator feels like it was made with the plastic they use in PEZ dispensers. And a guy across the road hung himself after setting fire to the claims office. This is some indication that I might not be popular here. Someone else left some old Nazi propaganda on my windshield. Am I becoming thick-skinned? I seem to wave these things off now. My goal, I’ve decided, is to discover where my parents hid in the woods. There is a bunker somewhere and one of the old Writers Union housekeepers has promised to find it for me. I am more aware than ever that there is some dark hole in my life that needs to be filled with light.

“But none of this is why I’m writing you. I’m writing on account of your piece. It’s wonderful, from the very first words. ‘Franz Rosen asked of me only that I tell the story of one queer Jew in Germany exactly as I saw it.’ I’ve been going around quoting all kinds of lines from the piece in my head. I could imagine Franz standing there, his glass held high, with savage self-mockery, saying, ‘You know when people are most easily made fools of, don’t you? When they wish to be the hero.’ What astonished me, really, was the sympathy. I’ve read dozens of your articles, but never one where you were so much a part of the picture. I could hear you in every choice, in every phrase, even when you were being only ‘objective’. And that photograph of Franz, the perfect part in his hair, the thin starved face, the intense theatrical eyes. How old must he have been? Seventeen? And for what special occasion had he gone to the photographer’s studio? You got that right, too. Finally I began to understand your point of reference, your argument, and saw that it was the same one you’d once applied to my father: everything Franz had done had been to overcome a humiliation imposed on him without his choice, yet it was a humiliation he was fundamentally powerless to undo. The best he could do was live with it, make choices accordingly, play the heroic fool, or the ‘realist,’ or whatever else.

“And then, Nils, I wondered: wasn’t the same true of you?

“Who in that sense was far more a Jew than I was, so no wonder I couldn’t live with you. Well that’s a joke, I suppose, or half an insight in search of its whole. But I did imagine, just a little while ago, sitting with my coffee in the faux-leather armchair that was never my father’s and reading your article a fifth time through, that I had begun to think like David, or like you. Nils the spirit Jew. Was it the murdered Jews’ only revenge to turn the next generation of Germans, or at least its best and brightest, into themselves? Or did it work the other way? Did the Germans steal the Jews’ lightning out of their corpses and pack it into their children?

“One could of course go on that way. Who cares, finally? But I admired you so much just then, as a reporter, as a lonely seer. I’m embarrassed, really, that I doubted you. But of course I had to.”

And then her name.