Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

  Erik removed the Ritterkreuz and wrapped its ribbon around Lisa’s neck.

  “Does that make me a heroine of the Reich?” she asked, but there were tears in her eyes, and it tormented Erik to see them. He started to shiver, and she clutched his hand.

  “I missed you,” she said. “I had no one I liked enough to battle with. Joachim doesn’t count. He’s a snake.”

  “I’ll drag him up here and we’ll drink the champagne from his skull. I’m taking you out of this hole.”

  “I can’t leave, darling. The settlers depend on me. I negotiate for them. I play strip poker with the guards. But I’m not such a catch.”

  “Play strip poker with me,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be fair. I’d always win. And you’d never find out what’s under my hospital gown.”

  “Ah,” he said, “where’s the baron? He always wanted to see Theresienstadt for himself.”

  The champagne arrived—it was Czech champagne, as yellow as a dachshund’s pee and twice as bitter. But Erik didn’t make a fuss. He filled a cup for Little Sister, the male nurse, and then he drank with Lisalein, who kept rubbing the ribbon and the cross.

  “Father isn’t here,” she whispered into his dark eyes, and then she told him why. There was little enchantment in her tale. It was all about bargaining with the Leibstandarte SS, just before Erik crossed the Atlantic on his Milchkuh. Berlin was in the business of Jews, she said. The roundups and the factory raids had only whetted the SS’s appetite. The Leibstandarte’s coffers were filled with Jewish gold and Jewish Geld. But the People’s Court would have sent Lisa and her Vati to the guillotine had Colonel Joachim not staged their deaths at Sachsenhausen forest. Commander Stolz was the go-between. He had to pay Joachim the last of the baron’s fortune from Die Drei Krokodile, a few hundred thousand reichsmarks.

  Joachim had promised to send Lisa and the baron into Switzerland, but he never did. He held them in the Leibstandarte’s barracks outside Berlin. But it wasn’t some dungeon in the dark, like in The Count of Monte Cristo. Lisa lived in the officers’ quarters with her father, in the colonel’s own apartment. They had dinner with Joachim, fed on goose fat and wine from Medoc. Lisa was his prisoner, and she also wasn’t. He lit the candles, served the wine. Sometimes his mustache trembled. He was aching to sleep with her, but he didn’t want to ask. He could have ripped off her clothes, threatened to kill the baron. But his pride was shot. He was a murderer looking for romance.

  She should have twisted his earlobes and taken him into his own bed. What would it have cost her? But she liked to watch him suffer. And then he pounced like a jackal.

  First he broke her kneecaps; then he took her and the baron back to Sachsenhausen forest, had them undress, and with his own hands he rubbed lard on her body, lathering between her legs, and he set Lisa on fire, wanting to fry her like a duck in a pan. She cackled like a wild woman, spat in his face, and dreamt she was a burning tree.

  “I’ll finish him,” Erik shouted, “one finger at a time.”

  Lisa stroked the throbbing pulse under Erik’s eye. “Darling, what good would it do? They’d only bring in another commandant, far worse than Joachim. And all the settlers would suffer.”

  “Settlers,” he hissed. “They’ll never recover from this little camp.… I can’t bear to imagine you as a burning tree.”

  “Shh,” she told him. And she went on with her tale.

  Commander Stolz appeared in the nick of time with his own commandos. He’d been shadowing Joachim for a month. But Lisa didn’t remember much. She woke up at the Jewish Hospital, in her father’s old bed at the Extrastation. The baron hadn’t survived Joachim’s little funeral pyre. He died of a heart attack on the way to Iranische Strasse. And Lisa lay in the grip of some powerful fever, her skin like the hot crust of a mountain ready to erupt. But she wasn’t free of Colonel Joachim.

  He would show up at her bedside, clutching a fistful of flowers.

  “He begged me to run away with him and whatever he had left of my father’s millions. He sang about country streams in Switzerland, about caverns that rained gold. I assured him I’d seen such a cavern in the Grunewald, and promised I would rip his heart out as soon as I got well.… I’m a girl who breaks her promises.”

  “But the Schwanz didn’t run away.”

  “No, darling. But he got out of Berlin. He licked Himmler’s boots and was assigned to Paradise. I still couldn’t get free of him. He had me flown to Prague on Himmler’s private plane. He cries and grovels whenever he visits my room. I hurl my shoes at him. It’s a big act. I don’t even hate him enough to care. He has to feed the settlers, fatten them up, if he wants to remain in my good graces. Now fewer of them will starve to death. So you mustn’t disturb the equilibrium we have in Paradise. But why haven’t you kissed me?”

  Erik was bewildered. He could only imagine her as a burning tree.

  “Come under the covers,” she said. “I promise not to break.

  And Little Sister won’t snitch on us.” Erik slid down onto her narrow cot as gently as he could. He did believe her bones would break. He kissed her clotted eye. “Darling,” she said, and fell asleep in his arms while Erik wondered about this ghost town behind ghetto walls. The Führer slaughtered Jews and waited for the Red Cross to redeem his monstrous lie that he had fathered a Jewish Paradise in Bohemia. Was it Werner Wolfe who had sent Erik here, or was it the Führer himself, who wanted him to fall right into Theresienstadt, as another piece of decoration for the Red Cross?

  False Kronen

  29

  FINALLY HE VENTURED BEYOND THE FIRST PAVILION, into the settlement itself, this maze where the Jews of Theresienstadt lived, sometimes in little houses, or monstrous barracks, sometimes in shelves built right into the main wall, sometimes in huts that were part of a dead end, sometimes in dormitories within a pavilion. They didn’t wear the little gray caps and rumpled black-and-gray flannel of concentration camps. The Nazis wanted to give them the illusion of never-never land, their own resettlement town, a new Zion on the right bank of the river Ohře.

  The fog crept over the battlements, and Erik stumbled like a blind man. He had to wander about until the sun burnt the fog away. The settlers he saw bowed to him and then scattered. He had to make them aware that he, too, was a settler, even if he wore the Totenkopf of the SS. But they had already heard of the strange magician who had helped hide submariners in Berlin. Children showed him the paintings they had done. Little girls defied their keepers and held the magician’s hand. Artists invited him into the little studios they had concocted between two barren walls. Widows flirted with him. Other settlers were feverish when he offered them cigarettes—they were forbidden to smoke in their very own Paradise.

  He smoked with them. After a while, they trusted him enough to laugh. There were philosophers, playwrights, and novelists, all half-starved. They were astonished when he told them he’d gone to the Jewish Gymnasium, but within one afternoon he even found a classmate, a woebegone young man without a tooth in his head. And all of a sudden Erik had become part of some select society, as an unmoored secret agent who could enter into this labyrinth of Jews.

  They had jazz clubs of their own, but these starving musicians had little wind to spare and couldn’t huff and puff into their clarinets; their music came in hysterical gasps; their instruments had missing keys. It wasn’t Jewish Jazz, but some kind of bitter and brutal lament, the lament of Paradise on a swollen river. The staccato bleats nearly drove Erik insane, but he listened. He wouldn’t flee from these wounded clarinets.

  The children had their own schools, taught by the settlers themselves, even though the SS outlawed every school in Theresienstadt. Children were supposed to work from the age of fourteen; one of the far pavilions housed a factory where coffins were made, and the children stood along a crooked assembly line as nailers and polishers. These young coffin makers were quite adept and could produce twenty or thirty in a day—coffins with the finest shellac. But none of the settle
rs was ever buried in them. If they died of starvation or neglect, they were carried to the crematorium outside the walls in a horseless hearse.

  The SS had no supervisors at the coffin factory; thus, the children would accomplish their quotas by noon and then run off to the outlawed schools, held in some dark corner where the Nazis had never been. These Nazis seldom ventured beyond their own clubhouse or pavilions; they had Czech hirelings and fifty Jewish informers, who received extra rations but were as blind as the Nazis themselves.

  Still, the looming visit by the Red Cross had changed the complexion of the camp. The SS had to mingle with the Jews, had to entice the camp’s carpenters to construct a fake farmhouse stocked with stolen animals—a cow, a rooster, a rabbit; they turned Theresienstadt into a huge Monopoly board, with their own false money—kronen with a Jewish star and a picture of Moses emblazoned on them, kronen that could be bartered nowhere, except that the SS never understood the ingenuity of the settlers, who had their own system of trade. These worthless kronen could buy black-market shoelaces, the special favor of fixing a child’s toy or relining an overcoat with real lamb’s wool, private clarinet lessons on the same wounded clarinets, or even sexual favors. And such piss-poor paper, with which the SS hoped to hoodwink the Red Cross, began to explode in value day after day, so that Theresienstadt had a whole army of usurers after a while, and the biggest usurer of them all was Bernhard Beck.

  The king of cabaret used his piles of kronen to lord it over the settlers. Bernhard had grown brutally fat at Theresienstadt, fatter than he’d ever been; he stuffed his mouth with black-market chocolate and marzipan from the commandant himself. Joachim was in league with Mackie Messer, who would hold Paradise in line when the Red Cross appeared in their mythical white trucks; each afternoon, children climbed the battlements to search the countryside for these trucks and the salvation the trucks would bring. But Bernhard knew better. The Red Cross would fall right into the Nazis’ ruse. It would see kronen with Jewish stars and a café in the town square. And Mackie Messer would squeeze every Jewish heart.

  He’d already done so. He’d made his devilish masterpiece last fall, The Cabaret King Comes to Bohemia, where he wheedled stunning performances out of the settlers. Bernhard had bribed them, seduced them, until Theresienstadt took on a surreal tone, and spectator after spectator in a multitude of movie houses inside Hitler’s Europe believed that this somber camp was Paradise. Now Red Cross commissioners were coming to see for themselves. Mackie Messer would be their guide.

  This man-mountain wore sable around his throat; he had sweaters and coats, suspenders of an SS captain, kid gloves that couldn’t contain his monstrous fingers. He carried a cudgel, and with him were his Czech bodyguards, louts who lived off their master’s droppings. They surrounded Erik in a deserted courtyard and began to menace him.

  “Magician,” Bernhard shouted in a very weak voice. “I know why you’re here. I have my own grapevine, and it’s much better than yours. You’ll never kidnap me, not while I breathe.”

  “Maestro,” Erik said. “Louis B. Mayer wants you at MGM. What the hell is Theresienstadt compared to Hollywood?”

  But the maestro swerved under his enormous weight. He was performing his own little cabaret.

  “Are you deaf? I lost it all. I can’t sing a note. My voice starts to crack.”

  Erik tried to convince this maniac. “MGM will give you another voice. It’s done all the time.”

  A great sadness settled onto that swollen mask of a face, with its piggish eyes and tiny mouth.

  “Magician, I’m disappointed in you. What would I be with another man’s voice? I prefer Paradise.”

  And Erik was ashamed of himself. There was only one Mack the Knife.

  “Besides,” said this new prince of shylocks, “the commandant would never let me go. I’m his meal ticket.”

  “But you’re wrong. Joachim works for the Americans now.”

  “Perhaps,” said Bernhard Beck, an obscene quiver erupting on his tiny mouth. “Perhaps not.”

  And he fell upon Erik with his bodyguards and the perverse grace of his own bearish body. Erik had realized something was amiss with that quivering mouth. He darted around the fat man’s cudgel, but the Czech bodyguards still wrestled him to the ground.

  He had to stare at those piggish eyes, a mountain looming over him.

  “Magician, you might not survive your first trip to Paradise.”

  Bernhard snorted as he was about to attack, but then he started to squeal and cover his shoulders with his kid gloves. Someone stood behind him, thwacking him with a cane.

  “Schwester,” he squealed, “I meant no harm. I was introducing myself to the magician, honest to God.”

  Erik could barely believe it. His Lisa had climbed out of her hospital bed. She was limping, and had to hold on to Bernhard as she struck him with her cane. Behind her was a whole cadre of settlers, men and women who tossed loose pieces of battlement—lumps of stone and brick—at the Czech bodyguards.

  “Schwester Lisa,” Bernhard groaned as his bodyguards scattered. “I’ll behave, honest to God.”

  “Mackie,” she said, tossing a fistful of kronen at him. “Take your lucre and leave us alone.”

  He kissed her hands, scooped up the kronen in a bearish ballet, and ran after the bodyguards. Theresienstadt was another Wunderland, like the Fuchsbau above the Landwehrkanal. And Lisa was in the midst of some resurrection he still couldn’t understand; she kept rising out of Sachsenhausen forest like a forlorn bird. But she wasn’t forlorn as she stooped with the help of her cane and stroked Erik’s hair.

  “Schwester Lisa,” said one of the settlers, “are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Now you must let me be with my man.”

  Wunderland, Erik muttered before he shut his eyes and fell into his own forlorn sleep.

  Lisa

  30

  SHE’D ARRIVED IN PARADISE NEAR THE END of ’43, on an ambulance from Prague, arrived with Joachim, the new commandant. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to hurl Lisa off the battlements or have her survive. The fool was in love with a shadow—that’s all she was. He nursed Lisa himself, read fairy tales to her with a fury in his eye. He had his own adjutant pretend to be a male nurse. Little Sister was in love with her, too. They had a sack of gold hidden somewhere, and they dreamt of another life, in Switzerland, Canada, or New Zealand, or at a “nursery school” in Virginia, run by naval intelligence. And while they plotted, the commandant began to moan. The Führer had pinned medals on his tunic, and here he was flirting with the Allies like a whore with a pot of gold.

  They fed her porridge, and considered how they could earn more money from the camp itself. The Red Cross was coming, and Joachim had to be on his guard. But he kept reducing the rations for these settlers, and pocketed whatever he could. And they schemed in front of Lisa, as if she were some damaged child who had no relation to the Jews of Theresienstadt. She snored, pretended to sleep, and plotted against the plotters.

  She could win Little Sister over with a couple of winks. And whenever she had the strength, she wrapped herself in a military cloak and hobbled down the stairs with her cane. She didn’t even have to introduce herself to these Jewish ghosts. She was the baroness who had started a rebellion against the Gestapo, who had saved countless children and young girls.

  What did they really know about her? She was the one who had been the somnambulist in Nazi Berlin, maneuvering with her eyes closed, wearing a nurse’s uniform at the Jewish Hospital, hiding her little quota of submariners, most often replicas of herself, fierce young women of the mercantile class, blond and beautiful, with willowy legs. She could not remember having saved a single man, young or old, handsome or not. And when she visited the submariners in their attic rooms, bringing them food and sometimes cosmetics, didn’t she fondle one or two, fall on them behind a fake wall until those submariners were like addicts who waited for her kisses?

  They were as naïve and frightened as
children, with Lisalein as their savior—and their Nosferatu. She might as well have sucked the blood out of them. She had selected the brightest ones, the beautiful ones, with whom she could discuss Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, while she made their nipples as taut as delectable knives.…

  But she wouldn’t prey upon the beautiful girls in Paradise, wouldn’t be their Nosferatu. She hid behind her officer’s cloak, and could protect such girls, since she had some kind of curious relationship with the commandant. She became their Schwester Lisa. She taught in the settlers’ clandestine schools, stole food from the commandant, allowed the camp’s artists to sketch her, and was the only one who could fight back against Bernhard Beck. He had grown into a gangster at Theresienstadt. He ate like a wolf, swallowed up the rations of twenty men, while children starved. But the Berlin Jews were still in awe of him. They couldn’t forget how he’d swagger in front of the Nazis on Unter den Linden, with a golden toothpick peering from a corner of his mouth, and scribble Mack the Kike whenever the Nazis begged him for his autograph.

  But all his defiance was gone, replaced by a relentless greed. Mack the Kike lived only to feed himself and collect his kronen. But who the hell was she to talk? She had always been a predator who devoured men and women with the same cold fury. Seduction had been for Lisa a series of stratagems, a manual of war. And that’s why she had held on to that boy with the big eyes at the Jewish orphanage in Berlin, years and years ago, when she herself was just a girl. Erik was as wild as she was in his own timid way, and she had wanted to kiss him the moment she saw those German Gypsy eyes, take him into a corner and bite his head off.

  And here she was with him at the end of the world, within the battlements at Theresienstadt, after Mack the Kike and his henchmen had roughed him up, and she still wanted to bite his head off, but she hid that from him. When Joachim had greased her like a capon in Sachsenhausen forest and set her hair on fire—while half of her was sizzling, and she wished her own death—all she could see in front of her eyes was the magician’s mournful face.