Jeffrey awoke toward dawn to find that his heat had been cut off. The air was so cold that it poured through the hotel’s windows as if they were open. The bathroom tiles burned his feet. He could see his breath. He put on clothes over his pajamas as well as a second layer of socks, stripped covers from the second bed, and piled everything on top of his own. Eventually he returned to sleep.
Breakfast was served in a plain, high-ceilinged hall so large the businessmen and their rattling papers were reduced to tiny, harrumphing dolls. Katya arrived looking incredibly fresh, and was followed to his table by every eye in the room.
He rose and said in greeting, “You look beautiful.”
She kissed him twice. “One of those was for last night, in case I forgot.”
He fought off a rising blush. “You didn’t, but thanks just the same.”
She ordered breakfast from the waitress, then said, “I called the antiques dealer, Herr Diehl. He is eagerly awaiting our arrival. He sounds like a very nice man.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Was your room cold last night?”
“Freezing. And my bath water was brown.”
“Mine, too.”
“Rusty pipes,” she said. “Probably there since before the war.”
“In a first-class hotel.”
“They haven’t changed the radiators, either.”
“I slept in both my sweaters last night.”
“Good.” She smiled. “You’re learning to adjust to life in the glorious East.”
Their way from the hotel to the Krämer Bridge took them down ancient cobblestone streets now used as pedestrian passages. Gradually the city was awakening from its long sleep, with a charm and heritage that even the depths of winter could not disguise. Some of the houses were minute, built for the smaller peoples of six and seven hundred years ago. Most buildings remained scarred from the old regime’s determined neglect, yet everywhere there were signs of change—flashing store lights, cheerful window displays, enthusiastic street hawkers, new construction, fresh paint.
If Katya had not announced their arrival at the bridge, Jeffrey would not have known it. The line of old houses simply opened for yet another cobblestone way with ancient dwellings standing cheek-to-jowl along both sides. There was no sign of a river, no indication that they were stepping up and over a waterway. But a stone plaque attached to the first bridge-house stated that this was indeed the Krämer Bridge, built of wood in the twelfth century, then of stone two hundred years later. Closely packed houses lining the bridge showed chest-high doors, tiny waist-level windows, and bowed walls.
The Haus der Glocke, or Bell House, was a closet-sized shop halfway along the bridge. A cheerful little bell above the door announced their entry. They stood in the minuscule patch of free floor space and looked around. Gradually the shop’s clutter took on a certain cramped order. Along the walls stood a glass-fronted display case for pocket watches, a glass-topped table for old ivory and meerschaum pipes, and another for rolling pins etched with household scenes from the last century. One corner cupboard held pewter, another antique jewelry. Higher up, decorative household items battled for shelf space with old silver serving pieces. Two wall cabinets displayed clocks, and a third showed off miniature oils in ornate cases. Hand-wound gramophones on ornately carved legs elbowed against antique dolls and horsehair footstools.
Katya looked around and declared, “This is a happy shop.”
“Full of memories of better times,” Jeffrey agreed. “Two of the clocks in that cabinet are museum-quality pieces, as well.”
A slender man with thin strands of snow-white hair appeared from what Jeffrey had dismissed as a broom closet and now realized was the shop’s office. “Herr Sinclair?”
“That’s me. Herr Diehl?” Jeffrey shook hands. The slender fingers held a surprising strength. Katya exchanged a handshake and introductions with their host and translated for Jeffrey. “He is delighted that we have found our way to his little shop.”
“Ask him if we are allowed to carry off those two clocks on the top shelf over there.”
The spark of a dealer’s heart showed in Herr Diehl’s eyes as Katya translated. She told Jeffrey, “He is very glad to hear that Frau Reining was correct as to your eye for quality as well.”
“As well as what?”
“Honesty is a most valuable commodity in such uncertain times,” Herr Diehl replied through Katya.
“It’s a good way to begin business,” Jeffrey agreed. “On both sides.”
Herr Diehl motioned for them to follow him. They skirted a narrow mirror-backed cabinet crowded with porcelain figurines and discovered a claustrophobic stairway that etched a passage along the house’s back wall.
The stairs creaked and groaned under the dealer’s weight. They were so narrow that Jeffrey found it necessary to turn sideways. The stairs emptied into a single cramped chamber floored with bare, ancient planking and a thick coat of dust. Lighting came from one bare bulb and a single tiny window. Yet the poor surroundings could not detract from the glory of the pieces awaiting inspection.
“I judged these to be of collector’s quality,” Herr Diehl said through Katya. “Articles that would require a larger showcase than what I could manage here in Erfurt.”
“You judged correctly,” Jeffrey agreed solemnly and approached the first piece, a secretary-cabinet constructed of solid walnut, with other light woods inlaid in a series of delicate floral patterns framed by mosaic swirls.
Lines tended to blur between lands and eras in Central European antiques. Wars and revolutions had redrawn national boundaries and allegiances, often with dizzying speed. With each change, woodworkers and silversmiths and ironmongers and jewelers had adapted anew to the tastes of those who could afford to buy. In the space of a century, therefore, the style of locally produced pieces had changed from Florentine to Russian, from Austro-Hungarian to Prussian, from French to Persian. This particular piece was German, probably from the eighteenth century, but executed in Italian Rococo style.
The second article was most likely eighteenth-century Austrian in design, as the Austro-Hungarian empire dominated much of central Europe at that time. The inlay was subtly crafted to suggest a patriotic figure within swirls of clouds. Done during an era of occupation, when overt patriotism to anything but the empire was punishable by death, it was a most ingenious piece.
There were three pieces from the Baroque period, the name given to the Renaissance in countries north of the Alps. One was a remarkable chest hand carved in the shape of a vase, narrow legs rising and expanding to a pair of drawers that both broadened and curved outward in gentle waves. The piece was made from wild cherry wood, the original fittings of dark bronze fashioned like draping sprigs of ivy. Another chest of drawers, also constructed of cherry, displayed the traditional Baroque curved front. Beside it was a late-Baroque commode with typically extravagant Rococo inlay in the form of Grecian urns. This piece, too, was solid cherry.
A great deal of cherry had been used in central European furniture around that time. Four hundred years ago, several royal decrees had ordered all roads to be lined with cherry trees. As the neighboring cities expanded and required larger roads, however, these trees had gradually been chopped down and fashioned into furniture. Cultivated trees like these were known for their smooth, long grain, as contrasted with the cramped, gnarled grain for wild cherry.
The final item was a woman’s bureau, signed and dated 1809, and again carved from solid cherry. It was a piece made to stand alone, to draw the eye of everyone who entered the chamber. The finish was Empire at its best, simple and silken, accenting a wood so fine as to hold a jewel-like shimmer.
Jeffrey straightened from his perusal, released a breath he felt he had been holding on to for hours. “Magnificent,” he declared.
The dealer showed a trace of anxiety and asked through Katya, “You would like to take them?”
“Every article you have here will be a valuable addition to our shop,” Jeffrey replied flatly.
The man released a sigh of his own. “Then my own assessment was correct.”
“I will need a second opinion on a couple of the more valuable items, and all of them will require a closer inspection before appraising,” Jeffrey said. “But my first assessment is that you have brought together an excellent group.”
“That is good news. Excellent news. You will make many people very happy.” Herr Diehl appeared at a momentary loss. “You can perhaps accept more furniture?”
“Of this quality?” Jeffrey permitted himself a smile. “As much as you can deliver. No problem.”
The dealer puffed out age-dappled cheeks, said, “You cannot imagine the difference between this discussion and those I have had with other Western dealers.”
“Maybe I can.”
“Yes, perhaps so.” Through Katya he went on, “I have spent hours trying to fathom what on earth they were talking about as they inspected the undersides of drawers and ran their hands over nailheads and questioned provenance. Is that what you call it, provenance? The history of the owners.”
“Provenance, yes,” Jeffrey replied, and added, “All of that we will need to do as well, but not now. Yet even if the provenance proves questionable and it turns out we are looking at articles pieced together over several different eras, which I doubt, their quality is still enough to warrant a high price.”
“Not according to your competitors.”
“They were offering you a flat sum?”
Herr Diehl nodded. “And making it sound as if they were doing me an enormous favor.”
Jeffrey gave silent thanks for his competitors’ greed. “I’ll have to get down on my knees before I can say anything for sure, Herr Diehl. But my first guess is that you’ve got well over two hundred thousand dollars in furniture up here. After commissions.”
“So much,” he murmured.
“I try to keep my first estimates conservative.” Jeffrey weighed his alternatives, decided now was not the time to hold back. He pointed toward the Empire secretary and the cabinet with the dreamlike patriotic inlay. “There is a good chance those two pieces alone will fetch over that figure.”
“If you can speak with such decisive authority, Herr Sinclair,” the dealer replied, “then so can I.” He extended his hand once more. “I shall look forward to doing business with you for years to come.”
“Likewise,” Jeffrey replied.
Herr Diehl then became the formal host. “My shop is unfortunately too cramped for us all to sit and talk comfortably. May I invite you to a nearby cafe?”
Jeffrey and Katya allowed themselves to be led back down the narrow stairs. Herr Diehl ushered them outside, locked up his shop, and started toward the bridge’s far end. As they walked Katya said to Jeffrey, “He speaks a beautiful German. I wish you could understand it.”
“Your translation sounds almost courtly.” He motioned toward the ancient structures lining the bridge. “It fits the surroundings.”
Herr Diehl beamed as Katya translated. “For a number of years, there was little with which I could occupy my mind, as the only work permitted me was hand labor. So I read. I read the Bible. I read everything I could find about antiques. It was an excellent way of immersing myself in times where troubles such as mine did not exist. I also read classical German literature, Goethe especially. There was a man who made heavy Germanic tones sound light and graceful as an aria.”
“Frau Reining mentioned that it had been hard for you as a believer under the Communists,” Jeffrey said.
“All Christians in this country had their own experience,” Herr Diehl replied. “There were some imprisonments, yes, but in truth they were a minority. On the other hand, if you accepted Christ into your life, you knew what your lot would be. There was no question. You would lose your public name. You would never be granted a position that held any power of decision or authority over others. Promotions would be permanently blocked. You would wait weeks, months, years, for the simplest of government documents, even a driver’s license. You would never be considered for new housing, no matter how many children you might have or how great was your need. Your family would suffer as a result of your action, from the eldest to the youngest, without exception. Your children would never be permitted to receive a higher education. Yet all this became, in a sense, normal for us. There was no question but that this would happen, you see. It came as no surprise. This was the way of life in our country for so long. You entered into such a decision with your eyes open.
“Under the Communists,” Herr Diehl went on, “there were enough Christians in the cities for us to find comfort. The situation in the villages was far worse. A few women attended services, those who were too old or too insignificant for the Stasi to trouble over. Priests and ministers were barely tolerated by the local citizens, and they often went weeks without a friendly word from anyone outside the handful of believers. If asked, I suppose most villagers would have said that, yes, it was probably good to have a pastor around, for funerals and such. But not for them and not for now; they had to worry too much and work too hard just to survive in this life. There were frequent suicides among ministers, which the state made sure received nationwide publicity as a way to declare all who believed in God, even the preachers, to be mentally unstable.
“In the cities, with their larger populations of believers, the situation was different. The state gave us no choice but to get along, to form ourselves into a unified body. Minor disagreements over personality or style of worship fell into insignificance when faced with the issue of our very survival.”
They arrived at the bridge’s far end, which was anchored by a miniature church of ancient brick, so small as to appear a replica made for little children. “This is the Aegidien Church, erected in 1125 as a sanctuary for travelers and resident merchants alike.” Herr Diehl led them to a cafe set slightly below the level of the bridge proper. “This was originally a small monastery, a standing invitation to the weary and the hungry and the fearful to turn from the world of money and peril and woes.”
The door was narrow and little over four feet high, the stone walls almost three feet thick. Inside, the ceilings were arched and colonnaded, the floor stones sanded down by eight hundred years of use. Lighting came from ancient bronze torch holders adapted to electricity.
They selected a tiny alcove whose picture window overlooked the pedestrians. Herr Diehl ordered sandwiches and tea for them all. The waiter returned swiftly with a tiny saucer piled with a reddish dust. Katya and Herr Diehl shared a smile at the sight.
“What is it?” Jeffrey asked.
“Paprika and salt,” Katya replied. “It’s for our sandwiches.”
“Why is that funny?”
“It’s something from the old regime. Pepper was rare, especially in government-controlled restaurants where they couldn’t charge for it. Pepper had to be imported. Paprika could be grown here, so it was often served as a substitute. I think it tastes horrible.”
Herr Diehl spoke, and Katya translated it as, “These are lingering signs of what once was everywhere. We are able to smile at them now because the shadow is gradually drawing away.”
Jeffrey asked Katya, “Do you think it would be all right to ask how he became a Christian? I don’t want to offend him or anything, so please don’t—”
In reply, Katya turned and spoke in a language made graceful by her lilting voice. Herr Diehl seemed genuinely pleased by the question and replied at length.
“Some stories are easier to end than to begin,” he said. “I know that the ending arrives when I have opened the eyes of my heart and known the presence of the Lord. The beginning is somewhat more difficult, as it resides in the confusion that was everyone’s life at the end of the war.”
Jeffrey shook his head. “I love the way he talks.”
“You should hear it in the original,” Katya said.
“The crippling of my beloved Berlin began about two years before the Russians arrived,” Herr Diehl told them. “I was two years old, and the year was 1943. Our home at that time was a large apartment building with an inner courtyard in the city center. Still today I remember the British and American bombing raids so well, so vividly. Still I can see the planes overhead, great, booming sheets of hundreds and hundreds of metal birds.
“Every night they came. It was all automatic after a few months of the bombing, our reactions. The sirens would start. I would rub the sleep from my eyes, and wait for my mother to come and take me from my crib. I had a little wooden toy car, green and gold, and I made it my responsibility to carry the car downstairs. My mother and my father had their packed suitcases and their little carry-sack of provisions. I had my little toy car.
“In the cellar we were twenty, maybe twenty-five. We heard the planes, we heard the piping sounds the bombs made as they fell, we heard the explosions come close, then closer, then shake us violently, then move away. We heard the tak-tak-tak of the antiaircraft guns. Then it grew quieter, and then the sirens called that it was over, and we went back upstairs to sleep. Sometimes it was already light when we came up, and we would go outside, and it was a different world! The windows were gone. The building next door had vanished. The street had great, gaping holes. Fires. Running, shouting people. Great engines with different sirens trying to race around the holes and the rubble in the streets.
“A neighbor would come stand beside us and say that we had no electricity and no gas and no water. It was not so frightening for me, though. Either my father or my mother was always beside me, holding my little hand.
“The end of the war came at different times to the German people,” Herr Diehl explained. “Like waves from several different storms crashing upon our little island. The American troops moved fastest across our defeated nation, and we in Berlin kept hoping they would arrive first and rescue us from the dreaded Soviets. But they stopped just outside the city and waited for the Soviets to catch up.
“Refugees from the East brought horrible stories of what we could expect from the Soviets. I will speak about these refugees again in just a moment. Their true plight did not become clear until after the war ended, as the stream of homeless people struggling westward became a flood. At the time of the Soviets’ approach to Berlin, they remained few enough for their faces to be seen as individuals, for their voices to be heard.
“I was four years old in 1945. I was what they called an autumn child; my father was fifty-five and my mother forty-nine. To say the least, my parents were not expecting me. When the Soviets arrived, we were living in South Berlin, a section perhaps a half-hour tram ride from the center city. Our home in the heart of Berlin had been totally destroyed in the bombing raids. It was our great fortune that the day our house was bombed, my mother and I were with my father in South Berlin where he worked on a company project. Everyone else in our apartment house died when the bomb took the front walls and the cellar away. Completely away. I will never forget going back and seeing our apartment. The back of the house stood, the front was gone. No rubble, no stone, nothing! Our home was dust. And yet the back rooms were still so complete I could see the pictures hanging in what had been my parents’ bedroom. It made such an impression on my young mind, how the house had been split with a giant’s knife.
“So we moved to this less-destroyed section, into a house owned by the company where my father worked, just as word came that the Russians were advancing. Our first night in this strange new home, we began to hear their guns booming in the distance. It sounded like thunder, and the light they made on the horizon looked like the first, faint colors of a false dawn.
“As a child, I thought the Russians were evil ghosts. I had never seen a foreigner, you see. Then one day my father, who had been too old to be a soldier, was gathered up and taken away with all the other old men who still had two arms and two legs. He was given bits and pieces of several uniforms, I remember the right sleeve had been sewn from a different jacket and was four or five inches shorter than the left, and there was a dark stain over the jacket’s middle and a hole that had been sewn up in jagged haste. He was given only one weapon, a hand grenade.
“Four weeks later, he came back, dug a hole in the garden, stripped off his uniform, and buried it. Thirty minutes after that, the first Soviet soldier walked in. He stepped up to my father, who by then was dressed in his best suit and trying not to appear nervous, and asked what time it was. My father opened his pocket watch and answered, almost one o’clock. The soldier said, good, and took the watch. That was my first experience with a foreigner.
“South Berlin was a very dirty place. Filthy. Before the war, it had been the center for eastern Germany’s coal-processing and steel works. My father had been born there and had sworn never to return. Now he was back, had been conscripted and sent off to fight in a losing war, then had returned only to greet the Russians and hear that they were to make our house the Soviet army’s district headquarters. He was back, and living in the tiny, damp cellar while Soviet army boots clumped and thudded over our heads. But we did not complain overmuch. At least we had a roof.
“There was a park and a garden across the street. This became very important for us, because we raised vegetables there. It kept us alive, that park, us and our neighbors. We swiftly learned that our chances of survival were better if we could learn to live as an extended family.
“The Soviets were very bad, and most of the stories you hear of their atrocities are true. They took the last of our possessions—our clothes, furniture, carpets, jewelry, everything that had survived the war. But for me they often showed a different side, as many were kind to children, and sometimes they fed me from their kitchen. Even at that early age, I knew I was incredibly fortunate. I still had my mother and my father. There were few such complete families then. Very, very few.
“We survived those first two years with great difficulty. Those words do not describe the times, but no words would, so I will not try. My father had been an electrical engineer who worked for the coal and electrical combine. Before the war, all big German companies had their headquarters in Berlin. But now Berlin was no more. Destroyed. Leveled so completely that soldiers coming home from the fronts or the POW camps could not even find the streets where they had lived, much less their houses or their families.
“My father found work with a little coal company during the days, and at night he pedaled his bike to nearby villages and rewired the damaged electrical systems in cottages and farmhouses. He was paid in milk and vegetables and sometimes meat. He slept when he could. My mother sewed.
“Because my father worked for a coal company, we had heat. Others did not. Old people simply froze and died. The two winters after the war were extremely cold. The cities were hell, simply hell. People risked their lives to steal coal. There was no wood at all.
“Coal shipped by trains was sprayed with chalk over the top. When it arrived officials would look down on the train cars; a dark spot meant that some of the top coal had been stolen. The suppliers would then be penalized or sometimes jailed. So the suppliers hired very tough men to walk back and forth on these freezing trains and beat off people who raced up at crossings and tried to steal enough coal to keep their families from freezing.
“My father knew this for a fact, because sometimes he had to travel for the coal company and talk to the officials at the other end. There was no gasoline, of course, unless you were with the occupying forces. It took days and days for him to obtain the permits to travel by train, and then he was forced to sit on the coal wagons, atop little runner stations. In the open. He would sit like that for hours, wrapped in blankets my mother gave him. Once he traveled with the really privileged, inside an unheated boxcar. He never spoke of what he saw when he rode on the coal cars. Yet I could see how haunted his eyes looked when he returned from his travels, and hear how his sleep was disturbed by nightmares.
“There was no infrastructure in those early days. No cars. No trams. No streets sometimes. No resources. No food. The land was empty and barren and blown up and scarred, a landscape from hell. And the government was horrible in the east of Germany. Simply beyond description.
“The Soviets sent back German Communists who had escaped from the Nazis by fleeing to Russia and fighting with the Red Army. They came back to take over the new Communist government. And they hated the German people. They were merciless. The old people, the weak ones, the young, they suffered. And then they died.
“To make matters worse, much worse, there were refugees. Millions of refugees. Germans from the former eastern provinces—now part of Lithuania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, lands that had been part of Germany for centuries—all who could, fled to what was left of Germany. But when they arrived, starving and battered and stripped of everything of value, they found nothing left for them. No homes, no shelter, no food, no medicine, no heat, no sympathy. They came, they starved. They, too, died.
“Some months into that second year, I contracted typhoid. That was both very good and very bad. The bad side was how sick I became—very high fever, so high I almost died. This sickness stalked the city, with panic walking on one side and death on the other. At night I thought I was hearing ghosts, as screams and wails drifted through our little cellar windows, but later my mother told me they were real, the cries of mothers powerless to hold their children to this battered earth.
“Within a few days, the authorities gathered all the sick children who were still alive and placed them in a cinema. All the hospitals had been destroyed by the bombing raids, and this cinema was one of the few large halls that remained. It was something straight from my worst nightmares. There was very little medicine. There were not enough doctors or nurses, so most of the time I was left alone with my pain. The air was fetid, full of the smells of sick and dying children, too full of smells to breathe. The lighting was a dim, yellow glow, and there were frequent blackouts when the power failed.
“Every night children died all around me, their cries and choking gasps reaching out, threading their way through my fever to clutch at my life and pull it from my body and carry me off with them. And I was alone. More alone than ever in my life, before or since. We were not allowed visitors. I had not seen my parents since I was placed on the stretcher and carted away. I lay there in the putrid gloom and felt myself being consumed by the flames of my fever. And I cried, and I called out to a God I knew only through a child’s prayers.”
Katya choked back a shaky breath and reached for her glass. Both Jeffrey and Herr Diehl were immediately solicitous. Quietly she calmed the gentleman, then said to Jeffrey, “I’m all right. Really.”
“We can stop now if you want.”
“No we can’t,” she said firmly. “I have to hear the end. If I stopped now I don’t know if I could ever go to sleep again. Just hold my hand, would you?”
He grasped it with both of his, tried to rub away the coldness in her fingers.
“As I lay there in my fear and my fever and my pain,” Herr Diehl continued, “I felt something come upon me. I had not prayed for a healing, because I did not know what prayer was, beyond the words we spoke on Sundays and before meals and the little rhymes that sent me to sleep. I had simply called, and my call had been heard. That much I knew then, even in the midst of my fever-dreams. There was never any question that I had been heard, or that my call had been answered. A peace descended upon me, a love and a comfort that left me quietened and able to rest through that night and all the nights to come. It was only later that I could place words to the feeling. I had formed a solemn friendship, you see. The rest of my life, I have simply tried to hold up my side of the friendship that was forged on that dark and glorious night.
“That doesn’t mean my life has been made easy, or even good. A good life does not exist for a Christian in a Communist land, especially one who feels led to tell his brothers the Good News. But never again did I face my trials alone.” He paused and gave them both a gentle smile. “There was just one time when I did not share the miracles of my faith, at least not immediately. The day I returned home from the cinema-hospital, the Soviets moved out. My mother told me it was because they were frightened of infection.
“She was so happy to have both her son and her home back,” Herr Diehl explained. “I could see no reason to argue with her.”