by Elly Welt
Uncle Otto and Aunt Greta’s apartment was in a heavily bombed area near Alexanderplatz, across the street from the central vegetable and fruit market where the farmers brought their produce. It was a neighborhood where the poorest people lived, and it was dirty and crime-infested.
When my grandfather Josef Jacoby died, before I was born, Uncle inherited the family’s furniture factory and an entire block of apartment buildings in a good residential section of Berlin. However, in 1938 the Nazis ‘aryanized’ his assets, and now he and Aunt Greta were crowded into two wretched rooms with what remained of the Jacoby family library, silver, and china. They existed on his reduced veteran’s pension and on whatever my father could send each week.
I remember his first apartment. It was large and comfortable. And since he owned the building, he had a room in the basement where, each spring, he made his own wine for Passover. Aunt Greta, for the first seder, roasted a goose, delectable, with crackling crisp skin. And the liver! Roasted goose and pâté de fois gras Strasbourg. Truffles. Mother’s family had moved from Strasbourg to Berlin after the First World War and did not join a synagogue, although Uncle Otto had attended services now and then. Because they did not officially affiliate with the Jewish community, we were not on the lists the Jewish leaders in Berlin so kindly handed over to the Nazis. So it took Adolf Hitler longer to catch up with us. Grandmother and Grandfather Jacoby, “may they rest in peace,” as Aunt Greta always said, both died of natural causes before Adolf Hitler came to power.
After my first day at the Institute, when I delivered that stinking salami on the way home, the shock of the difference in the ambience was so overwhelming that I splurged one mark of the food money on daffodils for my aunt. With the remaining four marks I was able to buy two kilos of old potatoes, one of wrinkled apples, one of sauerkraut, two bananas, one piece of ersatz nut torte, and two newspapers. There was more money from Father in a sealed envelope, but that was to cover their expenses for the week. I was never told the amount. In my own defense, I must say that it was the flowers that most delighted Aunt Greta and that the corn polenta and molasses from the Institute more than made up for them.
Their building was suffocating from the fetid air, an accumulation of putrid cabbage, rancid fat, and years and years of mold from the damp Berlin climate. Holding my breath as much as possible, I climbed the four flights, and before I could even knock, there they were, the door thrown open, two smiling faces. Uncle patted my back and tried to take some of the packages, but I would not let him. He wore a brace from his chin to his tailbone. Extra ribs in his neck caused him severe pain. I took the bundles into the kitchen, lifted the daffodils out of the bag, and presented them, with a little bow, to Aunt. She threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek. I had to bend way over—Aunt Greta was so short. She had tears in her eyes, but she was smiling.
“We are so happy to see you, Josef,” she said. “We were a little worried. It is so late, but now you are here.”
They had no way of knowing that I no longer attended high school, which was out by one and was only three S-Bahn stations from their shop. The Institute’s workday ended at six and it was an hour’s commute to Alexanderplatz. I did not tell them, that day, of the change, although for their peace of mind I mentioned it several weeks later. But, all along, I spoke very little to anyone about the Institute.
My coming must have been the event of the week. It wasn’t just the food; that was important, of course. But they didn’t have a radio—Jews were not allowed to have radios—and Uncle Otto was always anxious to hear the latest war news. So each week I would bring him two newspapers: the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung—DAZ—and a French daily, Le Matin.
Aunt stayed in the kitchen to put the food away, and Uncle and I settled in the Berliner Zimmer, a living room peculiar to that type of building, with three doors, one to the entry hallway, one to the bedroom, and the other to the kitchen. The bathroom was half a flight down the stairs and shared with the other three apartments on that floor. Uncle sat on a couch that had seen better days and I on a chair by their small dining table, which was placed in front of the only window in the apartment. Since it was dark outside, the blackout curtain was drawn.
“Ah,” said Uncle, scanning the front page of DAZ and laughing. “I see that the ‘victorious German Army’ is again ‘straightening out the front’ in a ‘victorious retreat.’” The Russians had recovered Stalingrad two and a half months before, in February, and were continuing to drive the Germans out. Even the twisted, insane news articles couldn’t hide the facts. “It shouldn’t be long now before the Russians are in Berlin.”
“I don’t know, Uncle. From what I understand, the German Army is recovering in the spring mud on the Russian Front, and the Allies are having heavy losses to German submarines in the Atlantic.”
“That’s just propaganda. You can’t believe anything they say.”
“No, I think it’s true.”
“How do you know this? Josef, you haven’t been listening to shortwave?” He searched my face. “You mustn’t. Remember what happened to your Uncle Philip.”
Uncle Otto looked so worried that I lied. “No, of course not, Uncle. You are right. If one reads between the lines the news is looking better.”
“Look what our dear nephew has brought us.” Aunt Greta appeared from the kitchen holding up the cone of newspaper with the cornmeal in one hand and the flask of molasses with the other. “We will have quite a feast. You must stay to dinner, Josef. I insist.”
“Thank you very much, Aunt, but I can’t. It’s late and Mother will be worried.” It was absolutely taboo to eat at anyone’s house and take up their rations. Aunt Greta, who had been jolly and plump, was so wasted that her skin hung in folds. She was forty and looked twenty years older.
She went back through the kitchen door and returned with the daffodils in a white vase. “I’ll put these right here.” She placed them on the table with the black drape as background. Then she sat down on the sofa next to my uncle, and they held hands.
“I’d really better go. I have a lot of homework.” That was the truth. I wanted to read the stacks of material given to me by the Chief and Professor Kreutzer.
“Why were you so late?” Uncle asked worriedly.
“I was working on a new science project.” Also the truth, more or less. I pointed to the books and journals that I couldn’t fit into my rucksack. To change the subject, I said, “Aunt, I’ll need that flask back.”
She jumped up and went into the kitchen. I followed her to avoid further interrogation and watched her empty the molasses into a bowl, then boil a little water to swish out the residue—not a drop wasted. I wanted to return the flask to Krupinsky in the morning.
The people in my lab usually drifted in about nine, continuing the discussion they had started over tea in the cafeteria. It was always about the war. Krupinsky saw an early end in every Allied action, and his daily news analysis was hopeful, loud, and couched in a framework of sexual banter: “Hey, Josef, did you know that the condoms they issue the S.S. are perforated? And when the Americans come and get hold of them, what will that do to the Master Race?”
Amid such chatter, the daily sorting of the newly hatched flies began. Since the work was mechanical and needed no thought, the dialogue could continue throughout the morning. But one morning at the end of my first six weeks, Krupinsky was quiet. Unusual. Marlene was telling me, as we sorted the flies, about her problem in hearing BBC the night before. Most people in our wing tried to catch the news each night on England’s German-language broadcast. It was, of course, highly illegal to listen to this and quite dangerous if one was caught.
“Bad reception,” Marlene said.
“Why don’t you try at night the normal medium waves and not rely on the shortwaves?” I said to her.
Krupinsky looked up from his silent sorting as Marlene and I talked, then asked me to join him at the far end of the lab where the Geiger counters were stored. He was most obviously dep
ressed and spoke in a voice so low I hardly could hear him. “I don’t understand how this stuff works.” He waved a limp hand at the Geiger counters and other measuring equipment. “And they expect me to do it.” He was supposed to measure background radiation several times each day. “I’m not a physicist or a mathematician.” He slouched against the shelves. He was tall, six feet or more, and too thin. “I’m a medical doctor specializing in endocrines.”
I could not think of what to say.
“Look, I heard you tell Marlene about the medium waves. You must know something about radios and electricity?”
“Yes, I do.”
He waited. He touched a Geiger counter and asked me, “Would you like to learn about this measuring equipment and take it over?”
“I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I would like to.”
But there was more on his mind. He thrust his hands into his pockets and just stood there in front of those shelves and looked down. “Do you really know a lot about radios? I mean, how to repair them and all?”
“Pretty much.”
He put his face into his hands and rocked his body. “Something horrible has happened with my radio. If I get caught it’s the end of us. My wife,” he moaned.
“What happened?”
“It’s stuck on BBC. Last night—”
“What do you mean ‘stuck’?”
“I mean stuck.”
“You can’t detune?”
“That’s it.”
“Can’t you change the meter bands?”
“Yes, I can do that—I can push the button from shortwave to broadcast to long wave, but all I get on those other bands is static. And when I push back to shortwave, I either get BBC or the jamming.”
“What kind of radio do you have?”
“It’s a Blaupunkt, suitcase model.”
“If you turn the turning knob, does the pointer move?”
“No! That’s it. The knob moves but not the pointer.”
“It doesn’t sound too serious. Most likely the cord from the tuning knob to the tuning condenser is broken, or a pulley has slipped, or a tension spring dislodged.”
“Could you fix it?”
“Most likely.”
“Then you have to come home with me right away!”
We could not leave until we had seen the Chief. He came every morning for half an hour, between eight thirty and eleven, and paced up and down our lab, often not saying a word, or sometimes asking if we’d heard the news; or there might be a few personal comments. We could ask him questions. He visited daily in each laboratory of the Genetics wing. And he knew absolutely what was going on.
While we were waiting for him, we continued sorting—Marlene, Monika, Krupinsky, and I. The new flies emerged from the pupae in the morning and had to be sorted every two hours until about one in the afternoon. They were anesthetized and put into a paper cone, which was then stuck into the polenta pudding in the bottom of a beaker. We separated the males from the females and the non-virgin from the virgin females before they were sexually mature—a matter of hours; a female only two hours old was still a virgin, and one could tell by its lack of pigmentation, by its soft, moist-looking wings. The whole thing just looked plump and still didn’t have the right form.
To propagate the race, one put in three or four males with three or four females; to isolate mutations, one male and one to three females, depending on what one was looking for. The females had to be virgins, so I spent much time looking for virgins, peering at the females, at first at a distance through the microscope, and then, later, when I was more adept, with my naked eye.
In the beginning, the discovery of the variations was exciting, but soon the sorting became so monotonous that I came to prefer being assigned to monitoring the linear accelerator. Sitting in the booth of the Radiation Laboratory—even for as long as forty-eight hours—was a relief. There one could ruminate in peace with only occasional interruptions.
Krupinsky was feeling a bit more cheerful now since I told him I thought I could fix his radio, and he instructed me in a loud voice: “Look out, Josef. As soon as those females mature: wham! That’s it, and you have to look around for another virgin.”
He said “wham!” with such force that he blew away the little flies from the cone he held, and he had to look for more virgins himself. One had to be careful not to expel a strong current of air at them or they were gone. If one were to laugh too hard, for example, the flies would disappear.
Krupinsky delighted in pointing out the sex organ in the male—“Look, it has a built-in French tickler”—and often he asked me to notice the special comb on the legs of the male which allowed it to grip the female tight during coitus. For a boy like me, nurtured in the bosom of Victorian antisexual propaganda, the atmosphere was like that of a stag movie, and Krupinsky sustained the tension with his continual teasing and innuendo.
The Chief came into our lab before ten and sent for Sonja Press and for the Rare Earths Chemist to help complete the sorting so that Krupinsky and I could take off at once to fix Krupinsky’s radio. The Chief said I needn’t bother coming back until the next day, since the distances were so great, and he gave me three biology books to read. Krupinsky and I gathered together some tools and left.
On the way, Krupinsky told me about his situation. He was 100 percent Jewish, married to a Gentile, and had been working as an endocrinologist at the Charité in 1938 when Adolf Hitler banned Jews from the practice of medicine—the same law that affected my mother. The Chief took him in, but the only way they could get by the authorities was to hire him as an apprentice biologist and pay him very little. So he and his wife had an even smaller apartment than my uncle. Everything but the bath, which was shared and down half a flight of stairs, was in one room.
His wife was still in bed when we got there, and when she heard us at the door, she shouted out, “Abe, is that you?” By the time he said yes and unlocked the door, Frau Krupinsky was completely out of the bed, her arms raised in supplication like those pictures of Eve being forced out of Eden, except that Frau Krupinsky didn’t have even a fig leaf. The only thing she wore was a little silver cross on a thin chain at her breasts, which were all that I noticed in my shock—not her face or her genitals but those melon-full breasts hung onto a bony rib cage, not too heavy, but full and ripe and with the rosiest nipples.
“Oh, Abe, I have been so frightened.” She flew naked into Krupinsky’s arms. He walked her backward toward the bed and tried to pull the blanket off to cover her while still protecting her from my view.
I could not take my eyes off his wife. I, sixteen-and-a-half-year-old idiot, just stood there gaping, with a bulge in my pants and one urgent desire: to see them again. Krupinsky finally got the blanket around his wife, but in doing so he uncovered the radio, which was resting on a pillow at the foot of the bed.
“For God’s sake,” he hissed at me. “Shut the damn door.”
I closed the door.
There was some confusion. Frau Krupinsky in a blanket sat on the bed with the radio. Krupinsky, still blocking her from my eyes, tried to calm her down. “You knew I’d come back, Kirsti. I said I would. And Josef here can fix anything.” He turned around and looked me down and up, his eyes stopping an instant at my crotch. “You got an eyeful, didn’t you, Bernhardt?”
It was what one might call an awkward social situation, and it had not been covered by lectures in my Dancing and Social Behavior Class. Fortunately, his wife had more sense than the two of us.
“It’s not the boy’s fault, Abe. Leave him alone. Josef, is it?” she said to me. “Why don’t you turn your back while I put something on?”
Her sweet voice restored some health to the situation. I turned around and diverted my mind by taking the various tools from my rucksack and arranging them neatly on their table, all the while translating the intimate sounds of a woman dressing: stepping into her corset, fastening the hooks, sitting on the groaning bed to pull on her stockings, sliding her slip silkily down
her body.
“You can turn around now.” The melody of her speech was not native German, although the accent was correct.
She wore a blue-patterned housedress that buttoned all the way down the front. And they were completely encaged and undistinguished beneath corset, slip, and dress. But the memory of them is vivid in my mind till this day.
I looked at her face. For those who like strong Nordic features, Frau Krupinsky would seem most attractive.
“Could we move the radio over to the table?” I said. “There’s more light, and I’ve got my tools ready.”
“I’ll bet you have,” muttered Krupinsky, pulling the radio to the edge of the bed.
To get to the tuning linkage, I had to pull the chassis out of the cabinet. Much work. All those knobs had to come off. At first, Krupinsky hung over me, watching, until I said, “You’re making me nervous.” So he went over and sat beside his wife on the bed. He couldn’t keep his hands off and I heard her whisper, “Abe, not now, later.” I could tell by the way she said “later” that she wanted it. Probably as soon as I left. Damn him.
My diagnosis was correct. The cord to the tuning condenser was broken and the radio was permanently tuned to BBC. The linkage in the receiver was, as in most radios, a cord kept under tension by a spring and threaded over a number of little wheels from the axis of the tuning rod to the wheel on the main triple-tuning condenser. The path of the cord was complicated. If one is lucky, he finds the remainder of the broken cord and can use it as a guide by knotting the new cord to the old one and by pulling them both through the proper pathway. And I was lucky. It had broken in the favorite spot of breakage, right where it attaches to the big wheel of the condenser. Of course, one could not buy a new cord.
I stood up and turned around. And there he was, sitting beside her on the bed, an arm around her with the hand clutching the side of her corseted breast, and the other hand God knows where.
“Do you have any multistrand fishing line?”
“Nothing like it.” Krupinsky disengaged and stood up.
