HOLLY ANHOLT

Fear

THERE WAS NEVER A MOMENT when I entirely got over the anxiety I felt for having made my bargain with the Schiessls. Nobody, not Anja, not even Nils, could quite convince me that it was not in some way a fraud. Anja did her best. She explained that my parents were precisely the sort of people that the claims law was intended to benefit, and that I was of course their rightful heir and there was no reason there could not be a mutual rescission of the subsequent sale my father made to Schiessl, in the interests of justice and so on. But it still felt like a fraud. A little bit, anyway. And if it was a little bit fraudulent, wasn’t I? I began to have fears that someone in the house, Simona or Mrs. Baum, would discover the little irregularity and hire a lawyer and it would be in all the papers, headlines to be imagined, but something about an American woman making a deal with Nazis to force some honest Germans out. The propaganda I found on my windshield of course aggravated those feelings.

Even the piece of paper with my father’s signature, the bill of sale, caused me to cringe when I thought of it. The two pieces of paper, really; the Schiessls’ copy and mine. I wished they didn’t exist anymore, I wished I didn’t have to think about them. But of course the Schiessls wouldn’t want that; the pieces of paper were what they had to hold me to my end of the bargain. But then what was my hold on them? We hadn’t even committed our arrangement to paper, the lawyers had agreed it was better not to, it was all done on a handshake. There were nights when I imagined the Schiessls finally taking it all, taking my inheritance, and what was I going to do? Anja said I could sue and win for sure. But would I really file a suit against the Nazis in which our whole deal together would come out? Even Nils would be tempted to write that one up for his paper.

With the news that our claim would be coming up soon, my fears intensified. I was living in Velden now. Was I really ready to sell it? I tried to imagine Anja going to their lawyer Rosenthaler with a little request, “you see my client is involved in this little psychodrama, she needs a little time, can we sell the place in a year or two?” Even the thought of dealing again with Rosenthaler disturbed me. And it disturbed me that I had never met the Schiessls, that I had gone a little bit out of my way not to, or it was they who were avoiding me. It seemed craven of me not to know what they looked like, what they sounded like. I should go, I should seek them out. Maybe they’d be like Nils’ parents, maybe that was the template I should be considering, rosy-cheeked people who made jokes and baked all day. But I didn’t believe that. I continued to believe that I’d made a pact with the devil.

And I missed Nils, missed the chance to sort it all out with him, to be held and advised.