BERLIN

AUTUMN 1938

People meet people. That’s how the story goes. There’s no need to be alone, not until you take your last breath. You see a world bursting with people, and are fooled into believing that your days of solitude are over. How hard can it be? Someone approaches someone else, they were both moved by The Twilight of the Gods, and by Gerhart Hauptmann’s new play, both invested in Thompson Broken-Heart Solutions (‘The heart is the curse of the twentieth century’), and they’re allies already. It’s a fiction useful to the state, to society, to the market. Thanks to it, lonely people buy clothes, shares, cars, and spruce themselves up for dancing.

Through the parlour window Thomas Heiselberg could see that she was swaddled in the same fur coat she’d worn the last time she left the house. She hadn’t gone by choice. After all, the outside world offered her nothing. But his family could no longer afford to employ her. They had let her go and given her a white fur coat that had now turned grey. Parting is a chance to be reborn: something good might happen, another job might turn up, the pall of loneliness might be torn open.

She approached with small steps—she had put on weight, Frau Stein—steps that seemed to say, ‘Don’t look. There’s nothing to see here.’ And so you have it, the cunning of history: recent events in Berlin had given Jews like her good reason to hide in the shadows.

He watched her flat face, reddened by the cold air, her delicate neck whose grace was cruelly contradicted by her short body, like a seed of beauty that, in different circumstances, might have blossomed. She was totally alone, that was clear. He had no doubt that, aside from routine exchanges, she had scarcely spoken with anyone in the years since she had left.

A car stopped next to her. Two men sat in the front seat. She didn’t look at them, but her every movement indicated her awareness of their presence. She brushed a whitish curl from her forehead and kept walking. Now a stone wall hid her from his view. Thomas watched until the car disappeared in traffic. A moment later, Frau Stein emerged again and, he thought, saw his face in the window.

How his mother had mourned when she left. Frau Stein was one of the family, she had filled the gaps—the sister his mother never had, for example—until they came to terms with the fact that his mother had no sister, and fired her. In the final analysis, when his mother’s annuity dwindled under the blows of inflation, and their lives were in danger, blood was blood.

A knock on the door.

‘Hello, Frau Stein,’ Thomas said.

She nodded with her impatient gaze, pushed him aside. Their eyes met: the years hadn’t diminished the hostility between them.

He took some pleasure in her disgrace, which was all over the newspapers, in the law books and on signs in the street. Close up, he could even spot its traces, a tortured urgency in her face. Hannah Stein’s soul, just like her stooped body, was waiting for the next blow. Familiar with the house, and all its twists and turns, she hurried down the dark corridor and was swallowed up by her mistress’s bedroom. Thomas didn’t move, then he set out after her. She was sure to be plotting something.

By the time he caught up with her, she had managed to hang her coat in the closet and seat herself at his mother’s bedside. His mother’s eyes expressed no surprise when the woman whom she hadn’t seen for more than eight years leaned across and asked whether she needed anything. His mother said no. Frau Stein asked whether she was being well taken care of, and his mother whispered, ‘Yes’, which was in fact ‘No’. Frau Stein took her hand and murmured her name over and over: ‘Marlene, Marlene.’

Thomas imagined how she had crossed all of Berlin to see her mistress in her decline. Slightly breathlessly, she told his mother, ‘This morning by chance I met Herr Stuckert. He turned away as if he hadn’t seen me. I said to myself, very well, I’m already used to old acquaintances behaving like this. In my heart I always wish them well. But there was something strange about Herr Stuckert’s behaviour. I stopped and asked, “Sir, is there something you want to tell me?” I didn’t say his name. He could always pretend that he didn’t know me. He lowered his eyes and said under his breath, “Frau Heiselberg is very ill.”’

His mother said something to her that didn’t reach Thomas’s ears and Frau Stein nodded. He was overcome with disgust: it was all too familiar. The countless mornings the two of them had sat, clinging to each other in the bedroom, sharing secrets. Anyone in the vicinity felt as though he were invading a country where he would never be welcome.

Frau Stein settled the pillows under his mother’s head and stroked her hair, then buried her face in his mother’s breast. ‘Marlene, how did it happen?’ she said. ‘How did it happen?’

With a kind of lightness the two women made the gap that had yawned between them for the past eight years disappear. It was as if a curtain was opened, revealing an older landscape: here they were again, a dreamy mistress who, on the rare occasions she ventured into the world, remembered its harshness and withdrew, and a housekeeper who had become her good friend and, in taking over her duties, had built the wall that kept her mistress isolated. They were rebelling now against the scraps of time that remained, mourning the years that had passed, and the hours that were slipping away.

Do you still want to protect her, Frau Stein? Thomas thought in anger and turned away. Do you want to protect her from the years she sacrificed, the injustices that stained her wedding dress, the errors of her life? Then you’ll have to sketch the figure of a hangman. Here he is: a horrible illness that devastates your mistress’s body and shoves her towards death. And you still believe you can do something for her?

Thomas stood in the roomy parlour. Following his mother’s orders, the thick velvet curtains were always drawn. He turned on a lamp beside the sofa with its down cushions, and looked at the statuettes—an Auguste Rodin, a porcelain Arc de Triomphe, and a little gilded Buddha, a gift she received from a scholar she met when she was young, and under whose influence she had become interested in the religions of the Far East. Above the Buddha, on a shelf, stood a picture of Ernst Jünger, with a dedication: ‘To Marlene, whose curiosity is so marvellous.’ Artificial plants surrounded the arched fireplace, decorated with Delft tiles that featured silly pictures of lakes and windmills. He always felt dizzy at the sight of this parlour, confronted by the clutter that was intended to reveal the breadth of his mother’s thought.

Thomas decided to ignore what was happening in the bedroom, sat at the desk, and made a few last corrections to the presentation he was to give that evening to convince the directors of Daimler-Benz that the Milton Company was the answer to their needs. What a shame little Frau Stein hadn’t come across certain articles in the newspapers, where his name was mentioned. What a shame she didn’t know about his triumphs.

In his early twenties, while his father and his unemployed friends were trudging the streets of Berlin dressed as tyres, sandwiches or chocolate bars, he had already dreamed up an original plan. About two years after he finished his degree, he read that the Milton market research company was planning to open a branch in Germany. Milton, an American company, with its offices all over the world but only one in Europe—in England of all places—had kindled his imagination even while he was a student. An American friend who was enrolled in economics told him about Milton and its advanced market research, which was at least ten years ahead of Europe. That had been one of the only points of light at the University of Berlin. In the early 1920s he was of course interested in the social sciences, and even considered studying linguistics, but in the end, influenced by his mother, who believed that ‘a change would take place in his spirit’ if he enrolled at a university that took pride in its intellectuals, he had studied philosophy, which he mainly thought a waste of time. The moment he received his degree of ‘Magister’ he left.

In the winter of 1926, when he was twenty-three, he travelled to London, where he met an American named Jack Fiske, the director of the European department of Milton. He spent months—with the help of an American teacher he had hired—polishing up his English in preparation for his presentation to Fiske. He sat in a leather upholstered chair in the spacious office of the director, whose wrinkled face and thick moustache impressed him, and pored over a huge blue, red and white map of the world that had numerous flags marking Milton branches pinned to it. Seeing that map, he knew he had made the right decision. He decided to adopt a forthright manner that would put off most German executives.

The director eyed him suspiciously, as if he couldn’t understand where this young Berliner had sprung from, with his flashy suit, blue cravat and carnation in his lapel. Thomas crossed his long legs, offered his host some fine Dutch tobacco, lit his pipe and amiably asked what had inspired the choice of a desk in the shape of a pirate ship. Then he plunged in. ‘My dear Mr Fiske,’ he said, ‘I have read about your plan to open a new branch of Milton on the continent, in Berlin in fact, my hometown. First, sir, allow me to congratulate you on behalf of my fellow Berliners. As an experienced market researcher, you will have already studied the opportunities that Europe offers, and learned from your limited success in England. Let’s face it: Milton has stumbled in Europe. Sadly, one might say that you haven’t even reached the continent. A small prediction: it will be even harder in Berlin. Sir, how do I know? It’s simple. Every community has its own system of assumptions, and the parameters of market research that have been applied to the Americans won’t do for us Germans. From my sources I’ve learned that in your meetings with German companies you boast about Milton’s scientific methods. But remember: the aura of science is in fact a fiction. You might persuade a few gullible Germans who love to “scientificate” everything, but we both know that in two years even the most naive will realise that your methods aren’t effective, and they’ll boot you out of the German market.

‘My dear sir, the only science that works here is the science of the German national spirit. You don’t understand the German essence. You aren’t the first and won’t be the last. The German essence is hard to understand. Some believe that our tradition, our scholarship, our art and our philosophy have produced a fascinating mosaic of personality types. I am, however, sorry to inform you that the German spirit is much simpler. Sir, you will be surprised to discover how easily this spirit can be deciphered and manipulated. It is not the kind of simplicity that you Americans are familiar with. The educated German bourgeoisie are, for example, nothing like your assertive east-coast Americans. To understand them you have to study them in depth. The last move in a chess game may seem obvious, but it is preceded by intense preparation.’

Fiske stretched out his legs and wrinkled his brow. ‘Actually, Mr Heiselberg, Milton has recently made a thorough study of the German market,’ he said.

Thomas sensed that their meeting was giving him pleasure, and that Fiske was testing him. ‘With all due respect, sir, my mother will hunt down lions in the Colosseum before Americans understand the German mind. Have you read Ernst Jünger? Certainly not. He’s a close friend. Do you know Wolfgang Pauli? The yearning for a great light is planted deep in our soul. If you haven’t seen the crowd in the Winterfeldtplatz in the late evening, staring at the shining torches of Nivea, you haven’t seen Germany. Do you know what völkish means? It’s actually a definition of the German essence. And are you familiar with Naumann’s theory about the state as a Great Business for the people’s benefit? Indeed, sir, you must agree with me that you are hardly an expert on the German mind…

‘Now the Reichsmark has stabilised, and the economy has improved, but if you wandered around Berlin a few years ago you would have learned about the true essence of Germany! You would have seen apparently rational people simply printing money and eroding the currency until it wasn’t worth a seashell. That’s German logic: to gallop, in denial, towards catastrophe.

‘The German person is composed of a mass of varying elements. You could say that everyone is like that, and you would be right, but the German essence, the dollop of sentimentality it contains, for example, is unique. I have been striving to discover the formula that will conquer the German market. You may wonder whether I have it already? I believe I do. I have devoted most of my life to the study of the German. Therefore, sir, if you want to do business in Germany, I suggest that we cooperate.’

Jack Fiske was impressed. ‘Young man, you don’t completely understand the field yet, but you have ability, and your gift of the gab is scary.’

When Fiske moved to Berlin, Thomas became his assistant. A year later he became the director of the new one-man Department of German Consumer Psychology. If truth be told, he believed he was born for the job. Even as a boy he understood that his talent was to pluck the right strings in the buyer’s soul. Now he played things well, combining persuasion, research and charm. Fiske asked him to work as a consultant with the American discount chain Woolworth, one of Milton Berlin’s first clients. Milton staff were inclined to think that the Germans would not trust a popular chain from a country that remained mysterious to them.

‘Surveys that Milton has performed in the major cities show that the Germans don’t believe that this merchandise is any good,’ announced Frau Tschammer, who gloried in her title of Assistant Director of the Research Department, though her real job was to hunt for clients. She was a short blonde woman who had lost her husband in the Great War and was bringing up two children on her own, and she always overestimated the discernment of the German consumer. Thomas saw her as the faint, self-righteous voice of the old world. Frau Tschammer annoyed him, and he intended to chop off her head—professionally, of course—by the end of the year; the stratagems of a grand master were hardly necessary here. Meanwhile, she shocked him by recommending that prices be raised in order to increase sales.

Thomas stood up. ‘First, I must disagree with Frau Tschammer,’ he said. ‘Germans are very curious about America. Second, I suggest that Woolworth should burst into the market from above. I remember how excited everyone got when a plane sprayed Persil in the sky, and that was only laundry detergent. A giant company like Woolworth should buy the skies of Berlin for a month. We’ll wipe out every other company. You won’t be able to look up and see anything that isn’t a banner, a beacon or Woolworth skywriting. And if we have to, birds, too. We’ll rent all the Zeppelins, the planes, anything that can take wing. And if our competitors get hold of an aircraft, we can intercept it for all I care.’

The Americans loved it. From the books he had read and the movies he had seen, he concluded that Americans liked daring statements that expressed an adventurous idea and promised a decisive blow against the enemy. ‘Let’s do A, and we’ll show them! Let’s do B, and we’ll wipe them out. Let’s do C, and they’ll lose so much they’ll be selling trinkets in the street.’ The more uninhibited his ideas, the more they were convinced that he was ‘a man after our own heart’. They had to believe he was prepared to burn down Dresden to sell a teapot.

‘Our lights will shine from every truck,’ he went on, ‘from every building, shop window and windshield. Product and price. Product and price will constantly change.’

‘Sounds mighty good,’ enthused one of the directors of Woolworth Europe.

‘I happen to know the people who work for Paul Wenzel,’ said Thomas.

‘The ones who registered the patent for a plane that changes advertisements?’ asked Frau Tschammer.

‘Exactly,’ he confirmed. ‘Really incredible guys. They have a lot of other patents up their sleeve. I suggest that Woolworth buy that patent.’

‘Do we really need a plane that will change advertisements twenty times on every flight? We’re just one chain,’ another Woolworth director objected.

‘I already explained,’ said Thomas, fatherly affability glowing in his green eyes. ‘We’re not going to go crazy or lose our heads, which is what people do in this city. First we’ll advertise a product and its price, and in the second phase we’ll advertise the chain.’

‘Interesting. Can you set up a meeting with Wenzel’s people?’

‘Of course,’ Thomas said merrily. ‘They’re close friends.’

His rise in Milton was vertiginous. Very few of its employees ever became partners, certainly not in such a short time. The meeting tonight with Daimler-Benz, which he’d been working on for the past month, could cap off a very good year; ever since the merger of Daimler and Benz, he had been dreaming of how he could snare their new brand, Mercedes-Benz. But the finale of his presentation didn’t please him. Too artificial. The muffled whispering from his mother’s bedroom was keeping him from concentrating.

As a child he used to sit with a notebook on the floor outside the closed door and write down the things that his mother and Frau Stein said, but he never managed to distinguish between their hushed voices. So his notebook was filled with phrases stitched together into one long monologue. At night, in his room, he would study each remark, deciding whether to attribute it to his mother or Frau Stein, until he had his own version of their conversation. He would celebrate a small victory every time he heard one of them say something that reminded him of a phrase he had decided was hers.

The whispering died down. Heavy steps were heard. He rose, but Frau Stein beat him to it and went around him, leaving thin muddy footprints as she hurried to the bathroom. She evidently still believed in the cold towel method.

‘Frau Stein, haven’t we developed more sophisticated remedies by now?’ he asked, but actually he wanted to say, ‘Frau Stein, haven’t you heard that the Department of German Consumer Psychology at Milton is me? I’m a managing partner now. You must want to hear about my enormous progress. After all, we’re not strangers.’

Frau Stein came back carrying a towel. Her dress was stretched tight over her protruding belly. As her eyes met his, he saw the indictment in them, her shock at how sick her mistress was. How dare she accuse him, even in thought. But she narrowed her eyes into two resolute slits, as though to proclaim: ‘Yes, the cold towel method is the remedy I trust.’

Frau Stein had a marvellous ability to organise events into a story that she devoutly believed. ‘Men against women’ was one of her favourite narratives. When she had worked in the house, she had placed herself between the evil of the father and the son and the weak mother and wife. Erika Gelber had interesting things to say about this. In his imagination, he imprisoned Frau Stein in Erika Gelber’s clinic: he laid her down on the stiff couch and forced her to answer the psychoanalyst’s questions, to confess her dreams, to confront the distressing fact that there were other points of view. A woman like Frau Stein—who always laid claim to the whole truth—would never let anyone else in the world show her anything new. In her view, everything she didn’t know formed a single grand despicable lie. Good people, who were few, spoke the truth and never betrayed you, and all the rest were liars. That was why his mother’s betrayal had floored Frau Stein. When the subject of letting her go had come up, his mother had asked Thomas to contribute to her wages, but he had refused, claiming that Milton didn’t pay him enough. ‘And anyway, Mother, Frau Stein has worked here for more than twenty years. You have to know how to leave people behind…’

At the end of 1930, Frau Stein had left their house and entrusted his mother to him, and now, eight years later, she came back to find Marlene on her deathbed. She was doubtless convinced that if she had stayed none of this would have happened. It was interesting that she still felt the need to protect the woman who had fired her. Perhaps Frau Stein did possess a rare degree of loyalty, and maybe certain people could never free themselves from old habits.

‘Frau Stein,’ he called out cheerfully, his eyes sparkling—even Frau Tschammer admitted that their clarity was captivating—‘have you heard that your faithful servant has been made managing partner at Milton, and that he is the director of the Department of German Consumer Psychology, including our offices in Paris, Warsaw and Rome? I set those branches up. Now the Frogs want to do it their way. Frau Stein, if you were in my shoes, would you let those Frenchmen have their heads? To be part of Milton, they have to fit into our systems, don’t you agree? I told them, “There’s no way the French office can keep thinking it’s still the last century.” And that’s presuming there is such a thing as the French spirit anyway. Perhaps the passion for fine but meaningless formulations is the French spirit, this weakness for style at any price.’

‘I don’t buy products from advertisements,’ Frau Stein said.

‘I could have guessed that, of course.’ Thomas always enjoyed chatting to her. That was one of the strange things about the connection between them: she acted as if his prattle disgusted her but often listened. In fact, part of Frau Stein marvelled over his doings, as if she couldn’t believe that a person like him truly existed.

‘All of our research has shown that the German working class is hostile to advertising, and the reasons are clear. Advertisements are aimed at people with money or at people who envy people with money or at people who believe that one day they’ll have money or at people who pretend to have money.’

‘Frau Heiselberg has asked me to stay with her for a few days,’ Frau Stein said.

‘She’s dreaming. That’s completely impossible, and you know it,’ he sputtered. How he hated people who denied the simplest facts. Now he remembered that he had to avoid mood swings in front of strangers; people might lose faith in his cordial nature. But, he consoled himself, it was only Frau Stein.

‘I won’t go out of the house,’ she said.

‘That doesn’t matter. People talk. Somebody might have seen you climb the steps. Actually, you have to leave now.’

‘Your mother asked for my help. And I intend to give it,’ Frau Stein declared.

‘Frau Stein, the subject is not open for discussion! I don’t have time to stand here and quarrel with you. Your towels are getting warm. Please put them on my mother’s forehead, and then you have to go. I’m in a hurry. In two hours, at 7 p.m., we have a meeting with Daimler-Benz.’

He heard his mother calling his name from the bedroom. He hurried to her. ‘Thomas,’ she mumbled, raising her head with great effort. ‘Thomas, I want Frau Stein to stay here for a few days.’

‘Mother, that is impossible. The woman is putting us in danger.’

‘Thomas, my dear, I’ve been in danger for a long time now,’ she said and stretched out her hand. He took it and stroked her thin fingers. Pain swelled in his body along with the memory of their old ritual: he, a young boy, standing in front of her bedroom mirror, always drawn to its wooden frame and the soft, flattering light. His mother lying on her bed, Frau Stein on the chair next to her. They would talk about him as if he weren’t there. ‘All day long the boy stands in front of the mirror and imitates the hairdos of good-for-nothing movie stars. We gave him everything! Philosophers and musicians taught him, and especially for him I invited Ernst Jünger here, one of our most eminent authors, and the boy asks him if he’s been to America…I offered him the best values in the world, and one day he will sell his soul to Pluto. Look at him, fussing over his hair like a girl, roaming the streets all day with Hermann Kreizinger, the son of that crook who sells fake trinkets. They do all kinds of shady deals with the delinquents on Oranienburger Strasse, who sell their bodies to diplomats and Frenchmen.’

The mirror had wings you could move to the right or left and arrange in a kind of triangle that multiplied your reflection. He loved to fold the wings. Here are the faces of the two women becoming molten and distorted; a face like a swollen balloon; a face as small as a coin; rubber faces that stretched from one side of the mirror to the other; faces as thin as pencils or as broad as the base of a mountain; Frau Stein’s eyes next to his mother’s lips; the snow-white forehead next to pink cheeks, bristling eyebrows under hair like a fox’s fur. He liked to place the wings of the mirror at an angle that would set as many faces dancing as possible, twenty-seven.

‘Dear Thomas, I won’t ask for anything more.’

He couldn’t bear the floating touch of her fingers, the memory of the caress that would never happen again. ‘I’m hurrying to a meeting, Mother. The customers have made a list of demands that we can’t meet. Times have changed. People are hoarding money, afraid of war…’ The urge to flee quivered in every muscle of his body.

His mother seemed to understand. She gave him a distant look that pinned him back in the position of the scorned child—once again he was gathering up motherly gazes like a beggar—and she closed her cold fingers on his hand. Now the release would be even harder.

‘At least let Frau Stein stay until you get back. I don’t want to be alone.’

‘If there’s no choice, Mother,’ he conceded.

Happiness rose in her face. She released his hand; her eyes were already dismissing him.

‘How elusive your mother’s love is,’ Erika Gelber once said to him. He left her bedroom and Frau Stein passed by him again, hugging the towels to her chest. Water dripped onto the floor. He looked at it with annoyance. Nothing in Frau Stein’s face showed satisfaction, but they both knew that, rather than celebrating her victory, she was elated by his defeat.

…

Thomas ordered his driver to park in front of the Milton building, so the clients would see the company’s new Mercedes-Benz when they arrived, and he skipped up the steps. He extricated his thoughts from the trap laid by Frau Stein and thrust them into the meeting. (Erika Gelber didn’t believe he was capable of controlling his mind, or could summon up the focus to make a firm decision about anything. ‘You psychology people don’t have enough faith in a person’s willpower,’ he once scolded her in response.) He removed his coat, handed it to the doorman and gave him a warning glance: this is not the time to ask for a raise, or to tell me again how your daughter is getting married and needs an apartment.

Meanwhile he went over his presentation: sales of luxury cars were expected to be flat in the coming months. Daimler-Benz needed a new project, a prestige vehicle that would appeal to those who yearn for something stylish but would speak to the masses too. In short—they had to invent the people’s car for the coming decade.

Thomas stood in his office—he preferred to spend most of his working hours on his feet, a position that filled him with a sense of vitality and strength—and called for his two secretaries. A week earlier he had announced to all the staff that today they would be required to stay in the office until evening. A clear message had to be conveyed to the Daimler-Benz people: Milton will be at your service day or night. He started dictating letters to the company’s various European directors, inviting them to the traditional New Year party in Berlin. Each letter was seasoned with a more or less personal tone, depending on the branch’s achievements. Then he called in an underling, who was preparing their presentation to a smallish client, gave him ten minutes to run through the outline, made his comments and asked for a finished document by the end of the week. While the employee was gathering up his papers, Thomas spoke on the telephone with his friend Schumacher from the Ministry of Economics, listing several ideas and the names of companies to which Milton might offer its excellent service. After taking care of a few other bits and pieces, he stood in front of the mirror, straightened his hair, smoothed some creases in his jacket and headed for the boardroom.

Frau Tschammer was in the hall in front of the directors’ offices, between framed letters of appreciation from Piaggio and the Wedel chocolate factory in Warsaw, hiding behind a newspaper. The letters had of course come from clients of the branch offices Thomas had established. Her face, pink and heavily made up, emerged. She approached him, fiddling with the front of her light blue dress.

‘Frau Tschammer, you’re prettier than ever tonight,’ he called and kept on towards the boardroom. ‘It’s time to finish with all the petty details of work and celebrate with one of your many admirers.’

‘But you asked us to stay late today,’ she complained.

‘Of course, but it’s clear that we didn’t mean you, Frau Tschammer. You’re in a class of your own.’

‘Did you hear?’ She blocked his way.

‘Of course I heard,’ he hissed. Frau Tschammer was an expert at wasting other people’s time with trivial matters.

‘Vom Rath is dead.’

‘So tell Elisabeth to order a wreath and draft a letter. I’m rushing to the meeting.’

‘What kind of letter?’ Frau Tschammer asked in surprise.

‘Frau Tschammer, what kind of question is that? We don’t turn our back on our clients even when they die. We’ll be working with the Richard Lenz Company for many years.’

‘Thomas, that’s not funny. Vom Rath didn’t work with us. He was the Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris.’

‘I’m quite familiar with the matter, Frau Tschammer,’ he interrupted. ‘For two days now, people have been talking about nothing else. Maybe you don’t remember, even though it’s your job to remember, but Richard Lenz has a manager named von Kraft, a not dissimilar name.’

Her astonishment amused him. Once again she had failed to understand how he dared to undermine her with some ridiculous remark dressed up as an unassailable truth. Frau Tschammer, like his ex-wife Elsa, insisted on speaking to him like a schoolmarm, despite his own flippant approach to things: The world is a game; it’s pointless to search for truth or lies, so don’t complain, play! He had already heard that she secretly scorned this teasing behaviour as ‘Heiselbergian Ethics’.

‘By the way, I have a lot of respect for companies and people who have finite dreams, like Richard Lenz,’ he added. ‘Not everyone is destined to conquer the world, Frau Tschammer, as you well know.’

He hoped that the Vom Rath affair wouldn’t ruin the meeting. The streets were teeming, feverish, as if yet another rowdy march was about to invade the city and keep people from working. Earlier, when he had driven by Kurfürstendamm, he had seen some hopeless types from Hermann Kreizinger’s old gang. Hermann himself, who now wore a shiny SS uniform, had stopped running around with them a long time ago.

‘Thomas, people say hard times are in store,’ Frau Tschammer nagged him, worried.

‘I have to get to the meeting.’ For a moment he was distracted. Fifteen years earlier, in the summer of 1923, a week after his father was fired by the Junkers aircraft company, he sat with him in the back of a café in Unter den Linden. His father complained about the madness that had gripped Germany. Those had truly been strange times: their whole world was being stuffed into a straitjacket and people were muttering about the end of days, while the hungry masses were staring at the advertisements that glowed in the skies of the city. Banknotes were printed with the paintbrush of imagination. People carted off salaries in the millions in wheelbarrows, but by evening those piles of paper weren’t enough for a beer and a sausage.

Suddenly, Hermann’s gang burst into the café. Thomas greeted him with a nod, as usual, but Hermann pretended he hadn’t seen him, which was how he had behaved ever since finishing school. Once Thomas had met him by chance and said hello, but Hermann only gave him a strange look, as if Thomas’s voice itself had made him feel ill.

Thomas didn’t understand the meaning of such behaviour. After all, they had until recently been close friends. When Hermann’s father had committed suicide, leaving his wife and children penniless, Thomas had been the one who sold their property for them, and at a fantastic price. He had taken Hermann under his wing.

That was truly a miserable affair. After the war Kreizinger’s World of Toys had collapsed. They had imported toys, electric gadgets from America, whimsical novelties that arrived by steamship—hardly essential things, but people loved them. The day came when Herr Kreizinger couldn’t even buy a pencil from the Americans, so they sold him some merchandise on credit and hired a lawyer to sue him. The lawyer had taken everything, and Hermann’s father had lain down on the railroad tracks. Thomas preferred people who jumped from the tops of towers. A moment of soaring through the air—at least one brief instant of greatness—why not get one last thing out of life?

After his father died, Hermann went hungry. Thomas was generous with him and taught him how you could get all kinds of things in Berlin for free. At least once a week, after school, they would make a circuit of a few upmarket hotels. Thomas would enter the lobby in the guise of an exiled Russian prince, for whom German luxury was a kind of insult, while Hermann, who played his faithful attendant, carried his suitcase. If the doorman asked too many questions, Thomas would put on an arrogant air and dumbfound him with a volley of Russian phrases. Hermann would then translate, in measured tones, a sequence of horrible insults and threats. Usually the doorman would retreat and bow before the young prince.

They would stroll along the corridors, ride the elevators and roam the stairs, with a single aim: to fill the suitcase with food. Sometimes they would come upon baskets of rolls or saucers of jam outside rooms, but usually they scouted for some festive event: a reception in honour of senior executives at Siemens-Schuckert, a family wedding, a party of American movie producers. On such occasions, it was easy to find crisp rolls and smoked sausages, cheeses and—on good days—beef cooked in prunes. Sometimes they dared to sit in the hotel restaurant, and Thomas would charm the waiters with the innocent look of a pampered youngster who never imagined that his father might be late for a meal, just as it never occurred to him that any delicacy might be beyond the reach of his lazy fingers. And there was that summer night, when they drank wine in the lounge of the Adlon, listening to a Mozart divertimento, and, as though they had all the time in the world, calmly stuffed smoked salmon and herring seasoned with allspice into their paper-lined suitcase. Hermann eyed the honoured guests in their smoking jackets, whose cloth changed colour in the bright light, and said to Thomas, half in admiration, half in anger, ‘Around you, people learn how to fake it, because it’s as easy as breathing for you.’

There was gratitude for you.

In any event, Hermann’s gang drank and chattered in the café. Finally the old waiter shuffled over with the bill. He understood exactly what kind of task the proprietor—a coward who stayed behind the counter clutching a loaded pistol—had given him.

‘Five million five hundred marks?’ one of them shouted. ‘Couldn’t you at least have rounded it off, you filthy dog?’

The gang stood and cheered while two of them set fire to the bill and forced the waiter to hold the burning paper and chant the new price. The waiter shouted in pain. His veins stood out and seemed to wrap themselves around his neck like a noose. Then Hermann pushed him to the floor. ‘Not worth the candle!’ he shouted.

Thomas knew that Hermann was taking a risk. Some of his friends would understand that the shove was intended to free the burning paper from the waiter’s hands. In short, Hermann had shown pity, and Thomas reckoned that now he would have to display his cruelty in some new way.

Hermann stood on a chair, waved his stick. ‘Are you crazy?’ he yelled. ‘We couldn’t even pay the old amount, so now you want more? How can the price jump by forty per cent during the two hours we were sitting here? Can’t a person even drink a beer in this damn city anymore?’

He threw his stick at the café’s display window. His friends sneered. Did he really believe they would think he had intended to break the window?

‘Isn’t that your friend from school?’ his father said to him.

‘Yes, but for years now he’s been treating me like a leper, that punk,’ Thomas answered, unable to stop looking at Hermann.

It dawned on Hermann that he had no choice. If you want to be a bully, you have to obey the rules. He stepped down heavily from the chair and looked around. The sun threw yellow light into his eyes. He blinked. His friends were standing erect, as if listening to a speech at an assembly. Their shirts were wrinkled, their peaked caps pushed forwards, their hands thrust into the buckles of their belts. Hermann turned around, picked the chair up in both hands, and looked back into the café. Thomas imagined he saw regret in his eyes. Then he bent his body and, with a mighty swing, hurled his chair at the window. The glass shattered, and the fragments showered down upon two old women who were having an evening coffee. Hermann’s friends cheered and pounded him on the shoulder, while the other customers stared. A few of them probably supported his actions or at least identified with his fury.

To Thomas’s astonishment, his father approved too. Animated, he started to chat with people at nearby tables. ‘They paid my salary weekly. Then I asked to be paid daily. I told them that the money I got at the end of the week wasn’t worth much the following day. The foreman sent me to read my contract again. “Herr Heiselberg,” that bastard shouted at me, “do you see a clause here about a daily salary? How come workers pick on the factory? Are you a Communist or something? Does your contract say how you should compensate us when not a single customer in the world bothers to answer our letters? They laughed at us even in Mozambique when we suggested doing business together. The German people are on the mat being torn apart limb by limb. Our economy is waltzing to hell, and everybody thinks it’s party time.’’’

‘The cheek of it,’ somebody shouted.

‘I’d have belted him one,’ hissed a young man in a brown shirt, apparently a member of Hermann’s gang.

‘The next day they fired me,’ Thomas’s father complained with gloomy resentment designed to inflame the small crowd even more.

Thomas stared at the floor the whole time and squeezed his father’s wrist, trying to calm him down, but his father took no notice.

‘Those rich guys have no shame,’ a young woman called out, cuddling her little boy.

‘No shame,’ his father roared.

In the expansive boardroom Thomas sank sweating into his regular chair, which was a bit higher than the others. The white light struck his face. He had asked for the lights to be changed several times, because lighting that imitated daylight was unbearable.

Indeed, it seemed that Frau Stein was cleverer than he had thought. Now he understood why she had turned up on the very day the news broke about Vom Rath’s death. The woman was a nuisance who had haunted him since childhood. He would gladly turn her over to the mercies of Hermann and his pals—not that those good-for-nothings would know how to get the job done.

It was almost seven, and Carlson Mailer hadn’t reached the office yet. Which was strange, because the meeting with Daimler-Benz had preoccupied Carlson, who was still, at least officially, the director of Milton. In fact, he and Thomas ran the company together, but Carlson, ‘the bosses’ man’, always had the last say. He was Thomas’s age, a tall American with short hair and the jawbone of a predator. Enormous boredom lurked in his black eyes and always made Thomas want to interest him in something. More than anything, though, Thomas was outraged by the way people admired Carlson because he made them doubt their right to take up his time. Even the clients were in awe of him. Thomas had long since understood that this human dynamic—which went beyond business connections, contracts, research documents—lacked any rhyme or reason. Carlson Mailer had a special gift for seeing into people’s souls and motivating them with the urge to please him, even if it contradicted all business logic. The man was admired simply because he existed, even though he hadn’t had a single brilliant idea his whole life.

Unlike Carlson, Thomas was a man who advanced in leaps. About a year after he joined Milton, an exciting period began when he set up the Department of German Consumer Psychology. The department went out and won clients, but within a year his energy had begun to drain away. He started to imagine that nothing new would ever happen again. One day followed the next and he didn’t understand where the time had gone.

The summer of 1929 triggered his meteoric ascent in the company. The senior directors of Milton went to the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville, and he was chosen to join them as the representative of the German office. Frau Tschammer, who had not been invited, was insulted and threatened to resign.

‘Frau Tschammer, I don’t understand,’ Thomas said. ‘When I come back, I’ll tell you everything. We’ll even take pictures for you. It’ll be just as if you were there.’

On that fateful trip to Spain the idea that was to change his life took shape in his mind: he was standing between Jack Fiske and Carlson Mailer on the second floor of Plaza de España, the splendid building that had been constructed in honour of the exhibition. As he touched the terracotta tiles on the wall, he looked down to the ground level, where there were benches decorated with maps of Spain and its regions. A hot wave flooded his body. He closed his eyes and saw a similar plaza in his imagination, which would be the centre of the Milton Company, and they, the managers, were standing above it between the arches, while at their feet were the branches of the French, Spanish and English Consumer Departments of Psychology.

Two years passed before the German office once again settled, under the leadership of Carlson Mailer, who had replaced Jack Fiske as the director of Milton Berlin. At the right moment Thomas had laid out his great expansion plan before him, in this very room. Carlson frittered away two months pondering things, but in the end, after Thomas managed to contact Fiske, who had meanwhile returned to head office in New York, his plan got the go-ahead. A magnificent period ensued, the best in his career. Every morning, he would piece the clouds together to redraw the map of Milton Europe, and the changing skies would urge him to conquer Europe. He travelled to Rome, Warsaw, London and Paris, familiarised himself with different societies and cultures, each of which demanded a different set of assumptions. When Carlson commented at a meeting, ‘I see that we’ve raised a miniature Alexander the Great in our company,’ Thomas answered, determined to avoid any personal conflict, ‘Don’t be afraid of challenges, my friend. We’ll set up a pan-European network, which, at first glance, might seem uniform, but which will accommodate local patterns of thought wherever it is implemented.’

He met dozens of people, some of whom inspired him with exciting ideas, and all of these encounters kindled his restless ambition. He planned that by the end of 1940 there would be ten branches of Milton in Europe. At night, in trains, he envisioned a Milton Train reserved for its employees; he dreamed of an American giant who extended his hand to him, and together they soared over the Atlantic, conquering the continent in one splendid move. Then the Far East, the British Empire—Australia, India—wasn’t the world grand?

Thomas looked up. A man wearing glasses entered the boardroom. He was not tall, and his thick arms were sheathed in the pressed suit of a government official, and there was a gold pin on his lapel. The man nodded to Thomas and limped lightly to the chair opposite him.

‘A ski accident in Cortina.’ He pointed at his leg. ‘My poor wife broke her collarbone.’

Thomas was not interested. This was one of those petty bureaucrats making between 250 and 1000 Reichsmark a month who had filled the streets in recent years. He had probably been sent to deliver some kind of message to Carlson, who maintained close connections with all sorts of government offices.

The man sat down and looked at Thomas again, pointed at the door and said softly, ‘Close it, please.’

Obeying the order, Thomas was disturbed by a number of things: it was 7.15 p.m. Where was Carlson? Where were the Daimler-Benz people? Aside from that, he despised meetings not arranged through the ordinary channels, and for which he wasn’t thoroughly prepared. Mainly he gathered that the man sitting opposite him had no doubts about the seniority of his own position, and probably with good reason.

‘The American Milton Company and German Consumer Psychology. An elaborate name,’ the man said.

‘The gentleman appears to be interested in the subject, otherwise he wouldn’t have favoured us with a visit.’ Thomas stretched his body, emphasising its flexibility. His anxiety had faded. In moments of uncertainty, he believed, his superiority to others would be apparent. Never give people the feeling you aren’t worthy of the position you occupy, or that anything they do might surprise you. ‘It would be a privilege if the kind sir would allow me to tell him a little about our company.’

‘Georg Weller,’ the man said. Thomas had the impression that this casual introduction was calculated.

‘My name is Thomas Heiselberg, and I manage the company along with Herr Mailer.’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said with a hint of mockery. ‘I was so overwhelmed by Milton’s impressive offices that I forgot my manners. It is my honour to work in the Foreign Office as senior adviser to Dr Karl Schnurre. By chance I was nearby, and remembered that Herr Mailer, whom I was privileged to meet recently, had invited me to visit him here.’

‘Dr Schnurre’s name arouses admiration in many circles!’ Thomas said. ‘Just last week, Herr Mailer, my colleague, told me that he had taken part in a meeting to discuss the expected challenges to the Foreign Office, in view of the poisonous diplomatic attacks against us in Europe, especially in Paris, London and Warsaw.’

He didn’t have the slightest idea who Karl Schnurre was. He mentioned Warsaw and Paris simply because it was clear to him that Weller’s position in the Foreign Office was connected to Europe, and if Schnurre was interested in Milton, he would therefore be curious about the company’s offices in France, Italy and Poland.

Weller’s forehead creased, and his cheeks bulged. He had apparently expected that his appearance here would arouse greater awe. ‘I am acquainted with the company and with the Department of German Consumer Psychology. And I have heard about your offices in Europe: Paris, Rome and somewhere else, right?’

‘Our flourishing branch in Warsaw, of course,’ Thomas said. Now he was convinced that the man had done his homework, but he hadn’t encountered such an amateurish manoeuvre in a long time. One could only hope that the Foreign Office showed more sophistication in its contacts with other countries.

‘A truly daring idea these days, to use Jewish ideas to sell merchandise to the Germans—or even to the Poles.’ He was speaking like a radio announcer, accentuating every word, and his voice was loud and clear.

‘We don’t use Jewish ideas.’ Thomas gave him a disapproving glance. ‘This is an entirely original adaptation of universal principles, developed long before the appearance of psychoanalysis in its present version, of which, by the way, I am also not enamoured. Here we have been developing principles formulated by German philosophy. We at Milton Berlin divert the decadent principles of Jewish psychoanalysis into rational and productive channels that befit the German spirit. I established the department to inject true Germanness into the discussion of the improvement and perfection of human abilities.’

‘Sir, you express yourself well.’ Georg Weller rose. ‘Herr Heiselberg, it was an honour to visit Milton’s headquarters. I just happened to be passing by and I won’t take any more of your precious time. Would you please convey my cordial greetings to Herr Mailer.’ He extended his hand to Thomas across the table. His handshake was soft. ‘I expect that an invitation to a formal meeting at the Foreign Office will soon be issued,’ he added.

‘That will be a great honour for Milton,’ Thomas answered, pushing open the heavy wooden door and accompanying the visitor out into the corridor, taking the opportunity to mention the strict qualification examinations for prospective employees that Milton had instituted in cooperation with the SD, the intelligence arm of the SS. Weller nodded and polished his glasses with a handkerchief that bore his initials embroidered in blue thread. They stood in the lobby whose broad windows looked out onto a narrow street decorated with poplar trees. Beneath the windows, around the entrance, stood benches in French Riviera style. Something about the room made Thomas uncomfortable, like his mother’s parlour. In every corner was a fountain with a statue topped by an alabaster spear—the work of an American sculptor whom Fiske and Mailer mistook for a great artist. They exchanged a few courtesies and parted with a friendly handshake.

…

The hours passed. Only Thomas and the janitor were still in the office. Should he let Carlson know that the meeting hadn’t taken place? Why hadn’t the Daimler-Benz people shown up? After Weller left, Thomas questioned the staff. No one knew anything. Carlson had disappeared and it was impossible to reach him. Had he not come to the office because he already knew that the meeting had been cancelled? ‘Maybe, maybe, maybe,’ Thomas grumbled. But there was no point in being disappointed, and it wasn’t all bad: a meeting with a senior official from the Foreign Office was preferable to a meeting with some client, right? He began to work out which clients should be told about the meeting, and which ones didn’t need to know. Of course, he wouldn’t tell them directly. The information had to be circulated in the form of a strictly controlled rumour. That was a tactic which he had mastered. Still, he would have felt better if the Daimler-Benz people had shown up.

He paced through the dark corridors and stood in the lobby. He shook his jacket slightly, passed a hand through his hair, adopted a pleasant expression and stepped outside. Thomas liked walking out into the street at night. Standing beneath the canopy of poplar trees, he would imagine he was in a thick forest, plunging into the darkness that enveloped him, becoming invisible as he groped his way along until, with a few quick steps, he would be out the other side.

An intense glare burned above him, and light spattered in every direction. Blinded for a moment he shut his eyes. How he loved to emerge into the glowing city lights. The sources of these great lights were big companies, and every new and surprising glow was a sign of an idea that had bloomed in the world, a stirring opportunity. He was always curious about new patents that other people invented, and nothing pleased him more than perfecting someone else’s initiative and doing it better.

In the distance the rooflines sparkled like Christmas trees. It was as if the whole city was bathed in gold. He advanced down the street, at the end of which was Schultz, the exclusive men’s clothing store. After darkness fell, a delicate light would bathe the fine suits in the display window, and the store looked so inviting that Thomas felt that every passerby would want to stop and buy something. Frau Tschammer used to tease that he was like Narcissus. ‘But Thomas falls in love with his reflection only when it appears in the display windows of luxury shops.’

Flames ballooned on the distant horizon. He heard voices. Looking over at the Schultz window he was immediately struck by the feeling of a routine that had been violated: something was missing. Fragments of glass were sparkling on the pavement. A boisterous group of young men in brown uniforms, carrying torches, passed by. Now he could see that the store was bustling with people, masses of them, with bundles of clothes in their arms. He spotted a familiar figure—the doorman from their office. Was his name Beck? He was hurrying out of the store carrying a pile of merchandise and a little girl with golden hair. Her round face was sooty. Her eyes were wide, and the doorman’s heavy coughs shook her little body.

Another band of young men with torches approached. One of them stuck his head in the smashed window and shouted, ‘Disgusting! Thought you’d get yourselves some kikes’ clothes?’ He hurled the torch into the middle of the store. It caught on a rack of fine blue woollen coats with delicate collars, and they started to go up in flames. Everybody ran out to escape.

A familiar voice blared from a radio somewhere above. Thomas raised his eyes. People were looking down at him from their windows. He began to worry: those people would have seen him standing there every evening, charmed by the Schultz display.

There’s no need to get carried away, he consoled himself. At times of crisis, people tend to interpret events as if they were being specially persecuted and their souls were visible to the whole world. Besides, Erika Gelber always said that his feverish mind drove him, whether he was awake or asleep, towards terrifying scenarios that had nothing to do with him, and conjured up horrifying visions in which he was cursed and condemned. And, even if they had seen him, he could always claim that he was standing there because of the disgust he felt for those suits. Maybe he was imagining the ruin of those Jewish tailors? What other explanation was there for his attachment to the Schultz display? After all, in Berlin there was no lack of more splendid shop windows, KDW, for example, decorated with paintings by Cesar Klein, or the windows of Hermann Tietz or Wertheim, stores no longer owned by Jews. In a moment, Thomas was prepared to believe that something in him, something unconscious, apparently, had wished for the razing of Schultz. The murmurings of the soul are such a strange thing—here was another fascinating subject to discuss with Erika Gelber.

It occurred to him that the suit he was wearing now had been bought in Schultz. But a lot of stores sold suits like that. More or less. Actually there were no suits like it anywhere—Schultz had its own line. Those little megalomaniacs always boasted that they made everything themselves. To hell with that stupid desire for bespoke tailoring. His fingers flew up to the back of his neck and felt the label. Fear clung to his body like the incriminating suit.

He was filled with fury at that vicious gang of rioters, idlers who had never done a useful thing in their lives and were bent on mayhem and destruction. It was time they contributed something to the German economy. He looked with disgust at a strapping fellow who had a few looted suits draped over his shoulder. How ugly his gaping eyes were, gawking in the middle of his stupid face, the kind of face you could see in every train carriage, and now it radiated this mindless expression of victory.

He crossed Wichmannstrasse and looked up at number 10, where the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society once had its offices, and on the second floor—Erika Gelber’s clinic. Where was she now? This wasn’t a good night for wandering the streets. For an instant he was worried about her. Though it didn’t seem as if this episode was going beyond destruction of property. He was sure they wouldn’t hurt women, especially not a respected psychoanalyst like Erika, who had treated senior army officers—not to mention her achievements in rehabilitating soldiers with shell shock. The army was compelled to admit that in such cases psychoanalysis had produced results no other treatment could. In short, Erika didn’t need his charity.

A boy and a girl passed by, arm in arm. The girl was saying something about the synagogue that had been burned to the ground, and the firemen who had rushed to the scene, and the crowds who had driven them off. The sky was hidden behind clouds of black smoke that absorbed the redness of the flames, as if a fiery map of the whole city was spiralling above them.

He heard shouts and turned around. A group of men was approaching, most of them SS. There was something frightening about their uniform movements. They glided forwards like a pack of wolves. He restrained the panic that surged through his body. If he turned into another street now, he would look suspicious. He walked towards them, and caught sight of the tanned face of Hermann Kreizinger.

Thomas heard the pounding of his own heart. The distance between them closed to a few metres. He hoped that this time, too, Hermann would ignore him. But Hermann’s eyes fixed on him. More than fifteen years had passed since they had looked at one another. Behind Hermann stood the young policeman, Höfgen. Two deep scratches seared his cheeks and twisted down almost to his lips. For the first time Thomas saw him without glasses and in SS uniform.

Thomas moved his head in greeting. Fear flashed in Höfgen’s eyes. He looked away. Hermann, unlike his comrades, was decked out in smart clothes: a white shirt with a brightly striped tie fluttering over it. His black shoes gleamed. They were probably new. Thomas remembered how on the first day of fourth grade Hermann appeared in school especially well dressed, and everybody whispered how his clothes had been bought thanks to the good business his father was doing with the Americans. Hermann sat down and took new toys that had been bought in New York out of his schoolbag. The boys stared enviously at them.

Hermann joined the SA, the Brownshirts, a few years after they finished school. His rise began in the early 1930s, when Hitler’s friend, Ernst Röhm, who had returned to Germany from Bolivia to lead the SA, took a liking to him. Young Hermann served him faithfully, and won kudos and honours. He would wander the streets in uniform, or hang around beer halls whose owners were sympathetic to the organisation. Thomas remembered seeing him march on that evening at the end of January 1933. He had a wild look in his eyes, as if he were longing to meet those people who had once doubted him, and whom he would now astonish with his rebirth as a victor.

In 1934, rumours spread that Hermann had been in Tegernsee on the night when Röhm was arrested. It was said that Hitler himself had whipped Hermann outside the hotel. No one saw him for a few weeks, and it was clear that he must have been eliminated along with Röhm and the other Brownshirt leaders. But then he reappeared, and, not only that, he had a position and a rank in the SS, thanks to the intervention of Himmler’s office. Hearing that he was alive and part of the SS, Thomas surmised that Hermann must have handled himself well during the crisis; maybe he had underestimated him.

‘Herr Heiselberg, isn’t it a bit late to be wandering the streets?’ Hermann said amiably.

‘I’m rushing home,’ said Thomas. ‘A long day at work…’

‘A long day at work,’ said Hermann. ‘How are things going in that American company?’

‘The German branch is jointly owned by Germans and Americans,’ Thomas answered reasonably. ‘We employ only Germans.’

‘Only Germans!’ Hermann crowed. ‘Your American cronies bring their corrupt democracy here, and shamelessly steal from Germany.’ Now he was speaking to his friends more than to Thomas. ‘Lucky the Führer has changed a few things in this country—not enough though, there are too many bourgeois whispering in his ear—but things are different, don’t you think?’

‘The Führer is doing excellent work. No one could dispute that his achievements are enormous,’ said Thomas, feeling a tremor in his right leg. It felt like the city had been stripped of its clothing, and had abandoned all restraint; the only things left in it were boiling soil and humans.

‘Interesting to think how your father,’ said Hermann, straightening his tie in an affected way, ‘would take all this: while the whole country is devoted to building a new Germany, his son is busy collecting dollars from American capitalists.’

‘Actually, my father died two years after I started working at Milton.’

‘You lot don’t know,’ Hermann said to his friends, who were all staring at him in boredom except for the policeman Höfgen, who was constantly fidgeting. ‘You’re too young. But during the 1920s Herr Heiselberg’s father was a devoted member of the National Socialist Party.’

‘Actually, until his death,’ Thomas emphasised.

‘Until his death. And while we’re talking about death, you must know about the horrible murder of poor Vom Rath.’ His upper lip, which protruded slightly, like the remnant of a smile that reached the dimples on his cheeks, gave his face a kind of childish impishness. His skin was still smooth, mocking the passing years, and still tanned. The boys at school had thought of the tan as an ‘American’ touch.

The familiar smile allayed Thomas’s fears somewhat. ‘We were all shocked to hear the sad news,’ he said, nodding once again to Höfgen, who stepped back and stood behind one of the youths.

‘The kike coward didn’t dare take out the ambassador himself,’ Hermann chuckled, ‘so he made do with a miserable clerk. It’s a good thing he didn’t shoot the doorman.’

‘Murderers like that are usually cowards,’ Thomas said earnestly. ‘People who always dreamed of some glorious deed, with a narcissistic desire to be loved by the masses, whom they actually despise. But there is nothing heroic about them at all.’

‘Yes. I like that: people who desire heroism, but have none,’ Hermann agreed. ‘You doubtless understand the reason for our interest in recent events. This is a difficult night for the German people, and we were asked to keep order in the streets. Would you believe that a Jewish criminal scratched Höfgen, our faithful policeman?’

Other memories of Hermann surfaced: had Thomas done him a great injustice? Hermann had suffered as a boy from his failure to behave well, and at a certain stage he began making out that Thomas was some serpent-like, seductive figure, dragging him into sin. But Hermann always acknowledged that Thomas had helped him in hard times. In short, they had had good and bad days. But for years they had had nothing to do with each other…Had he said anything against Hermann that might have reached his ears? It didn’t seem so. Thomas seldom spoke ill of people. Gossip was an indulgent weakness. Slander wasn’t useful; it was likely to give listeners the residual feeling that you were unworthy of their trust. In the final reckoning, the harm outweighed the benefit.

‘A nice place, isn’t it?’ Hermann pointed at the building where Erika Gelber used to treat Thomas. ‘Do you still go there regularly?’

‘Much less in the past two years. There’s a lot of work in the office.’ Thomas looked him in the eye. He didn’t intend to show him that he had been surprised.

‘Does your friend, the Jewish psychoanalyst, help you?’ Hermann asked.

‘Much less in the past two years,’ Thomas repeated, beginning to wonder whether this might be the right time to tell Hermann that a senior official from the Foreign Office had just visited him.

‘Very nice, very nice,’ Hermann laughed. ‘Baumann told me that his dad went a little crazy after the war, and that the Jews treated him…All kinds of things that you don’t understand that you know, or you don’t know that you understand. Something like that. Quite a deceptive business, no?’

‘Yes, they helped a lot of soldiers,’ Thomas said. ‘In fact I heard that they got a medal from the War Ministry.’

‘All this is very well, but we have a lot more to do,’ a tall Brownshirt, behind whom Höfgen was hiding, said to Hermann irritably. ‘Maybe you could chat with your bourgeois faker some other day?’ He stepped back, and now the policeman was in front of Thomas. Höfgen stared at him as if he were seeing him for the first time and was at his wit’s end.

‘Speaking of Jews, I’m interested in hearing your opinion about the murder in Paris,’ Hermann said calmly, raising his hand and poking his index finger right at the tall man’s face. ‘Maybe it’s time to react against the French, too?’

‘It’s a terrible thing, a great shame to all the Jews,’ Thomas answered. ‘And as for the French, those are matters that the Führer knows best how to handle.’

‘Believe me, tonight is the great shame of the Jews,’ Hermann said quietly. His dimples deepened, but cold mockery flashed in his eyes.

An alarming certainty crept into Thomas’s mind: it was no coincidence that Hermann was speaking to him now. He had ignored him for years, but tonight, the very night for which Hermann had been born, he was choosing to devote time to Thomas.

‘And maybe for their friends too,’ Hermann added. ‘There are Germans for whom the laws of the Reich are merely recommendations.’ The arrogant smile, ostensibly polite, vanished, and his flaming eyes scrutinised Thomas with hatred. ‘Didn’t you say you were hurrying home?’

Thomas looked past Hermann and focused on Höfgen, who was in distress. There was no doubt about it. The policeman’s gaze roamed over the group, as though trying to explain to Thomas that he had no other choice.

Thomas now knew that Hermann and his gang were planning to harm him, or, even worse, had already harmed him.

Far behind them they heard a powerful explosion. Bluish-orange flames burst out of a row of buildings. A pillar of smoke rose and was swallowed in the darkness. Everyone gaped at it as though hypnotised. Little fires burned in the whites of their eyes.

‘Yes, run along now, Thomas,’ Hermann said. ‘On a night like this, you really shouldn’t leave your mother all alone.’

Now he understood.