HOLLY ANHOLT

Decision

NILS RECEDED FOR AWHILE from my dreams. A fresh starlet assumed his prominence, though I never saw her face. Still, I knew it was Karen, by the lake, in the woods, at the market in the village. The faces were of old women in scarves, but behind them, calling me, living in the trees and marshes like a sprite, was a young girl, whispering things I could almost understand. And there was another character, too, in the trees, stalking the sprite, with a hideous, wizened face and foul red ass, a monkey of my mind. This devil would have raped and robbed her. I took him to be Heinz Schiessl.

Heinz Schiessl turned out not to look like this. He wore large square glasses that old people get as part of their bifocal package and that make everything else about a face look small. His shirt collar was too large for him. His neck was stringy, his little bit of hair was clipped neat and short, his glance was slightly vacant. I know all this because I finally demanded a meeting with him. What possessed me, all of that. I may have been possessed only by my fear. I’d had so much fear lately that it was growing intolerable, the way debt grows intolerable for some people until they throw up their hands and declare bankruptcy. I could have dealt with Schiessl as I’d dealt with him before, by phone and lawyers. But now by night he was stalking my sister. No way, sir. No way. Keep your filthy mitts off her. Have you no shame?

Though of course it was open to debate whose shame exactly I was thinking of when my mind thought such thoughts.

We met in Anja Mann’s office. He was brought in by his son Richard, a man with a pinched-in nose who in all looked a little like a chipmunk and who I imagined could have been an accountant or minor civil servant. As I shook Heinz Schiessl’s limp, arthritic hand, my own betrayed me with quiet trembling. I tried to remember what it was that desperation was supposed to breed. Invention? No, that was necessity. Maybe desperation just bred disaster. All I knew for certain was that if I was going to propose a second deal to the Schiessls, if I was going to be my father’s daughter, fallen and redeemed as Nils said, I needed to be sure what I wanted out of it.

On the phone I had told Anja what that was: only Velden. She labored to dissuade me. Speculation in the Scheunenviertel was heating up. The city claim was close to the Oranienburgerstrasse. If I was only going to sell anyway, why not hold onto what was most valuable? It was then I told her that I was no longer thinking to sell. There’d been a couple seconds of telling silence on the phone after that.

She gave the Schiessls few details beyond my proposal. Heinz at first gave the impression of a Teutonic Sitting Bull, silent, stoic, inscrutable. Richard whispered in his ear a couple of times and still he sat there. I began to think he might be demented, but that wasn’t actually the case. He may have been thinking about other things. He may have been thinking he was late for lunch. Who knew? But finally he was a stream of words, soft-spoken and a little high-pitched, and he asked his attorney Rosenthaler to translate, so that it would all be perfectly clear: “The city property is worth much more than the country property. We can’t know at this time how much more. Are you sure you wish to do this?” When he finished speaking, he looked at me for perhaps the first and only time that day. It was an appraising look, steady and unafraid, but not a cruel one.

I duly nodded in answer to the question, the lawyers talked between themselves for quite a bit, and that was that, except that it wasn’t quite that. The following day I received a call from the Schiessl son, inviting me for tea at the parents’ house in Charlottenburg. He said his father had something to show me. I went because I couldn’t think of a good enough reason not to.

It was a well-shaded stucco house in a quiet corner of Charlottenburg not far from the old Olympic Stadium. It turned out Heinz Schiessl was so pleased with the deal I’d made him that he wanted to thank me. We sat down for tea in the Schiessls’ darkly furnished parlor, his invalid wife shuffling in as well with what I understood to be a nurse hovering. All of it felt a little like visiting a nursing home run by the Addams family. Grete. Grete was the wife’s name.

“Bring the albums, Richard,” Schiessl senior presently commanded. Soon Richard was placing two frayed leather bound photo albums in front of me. One of them had the German word for memories written in a sentimental, slanty script across its moldering cover. What a remarkable feeling it was to turn those album pages, akin to coming back to dinner at a house one had lived in for years, that strangers now owned. Photos of their summer house, their rowboat, their bit of the lake, all dutifully, efficiently marked “1938” or “1939” or “1940” with sometimes the month as well. I wanted to snatch it all back, as if to correct a cosmic mistake. But of course it wasn’t a cosmic mistake. People mugging, people with their arms around each other, people in short-sleeves and squinting for the brightness of the summer day. One of the Schiessls was riding a horse. And then the point of the exercise: a number of the photographs were of other summer visitors, people who owned houses on either side and at other points on the lake. “Don’t get hopes up,” Heinz said. “I didn’t know your parents. We dealt through lawyers. But perhaps others who summered there – who knows?” I began to take little mental notes, photograph by photograph, as the old man described whatever he remembered. We were near the end of the last album when he pointed to a photo of the far shore of the Moritzsee, where two houses were tucked into the trees. “This one,” he pointed to the larger of the two. “Jews also. Until 1940, at least.”

“Was that possible?” I asked.

“Before I entered the navy. They were there. Yes. Rosen.”

“Yes? Rosen?” I asked.

He was sure. As well, he had a strong memory and he knew quite a lot about the Rosens, their business, their wealth, their relatives. They had only daughters, two daughters, but the brother of Rosen had a son. Franz? Yes of course, Franz. But the photos were only of the girls. I admitted nothing about already knowing Franz, or knowing that his uncle had a place on the lake. For some reason I didn’t want to deflate their gesture. I didn’t want to disappoint them.

Both of the old Schiessls claimed to know nothing about my parents hiding in the woods, or being caught there, or being even in the vicinity. Heinz was away in the navy, he said. Grete never went out to the country without him. I can’t say that I believed them, but I did believe that I would never get them to say anything different.

I spent another few minutes, thanked everyone, and left, feeling very well-behaved, like a girl you can take anywhere.