Joachim kept nudging him. “Make a toast.”
The Nazis must have been hiding Lisalein, holding her prisoner while the Red Cross was in Theresienstadt, and they might break her bones, but Erik still couldn’t toast these monocle-men. It was Bernhard in his cummerbund who rescued him.
Mack the Knife rose up with all his bulk, held out his glass, and said, “Meine Herren, what a splendid day to have you here, to witness for yourselves and the world what the Führer has done for us.” He started to cry into the blue napkin that he brought to every meal. “I was starving in Amsterdam. What do the Dutch know about Berlin cabaret? It was Herr Goebbels who begged me to come back to the homeland. ‘Bernhard,’ he said, ‘you will make a film for the Führer, celebrating Theresienstadt. You won’t have to wear a costume. You’ll play yourself—the Jewish king comes to Bohemia to be near his own people, who are under the protection of the Führer’s elite troops. Let the Engländers spread their lies. But Winston Churchill never gave a town to the Jews!”
The diplomats clapped and stamped their feet and licked their champagne like avaricious cats. And in the midst of this furor, Erik whispered in Bernhard’s ear, “Mackie, you make me sick.”
Bernhard whispered right back. “Cesare, I just saved your stinking life.”
The settlers drank in silence. They realized soon enough that the Red Cross had come with a cotillion of clowns. Nothing could save them now. They had kept their promise. They didn’t stop performing for the diplomats. They’d taught the children to sing and dance and do their entrechats. But the whitewashed walls would disappear once the Red Cross left Theresienstadt. The new kindergarten would be crushed. The Danish settlers would be swept back into their old barracks.
The railroad runs to Auschwitz would begin again. Children would have to suck the earth outside their barracks or starve to death. The bazaar on Neue Gasse would stop selling jewelry and clothes. The Café Kavalir would lose its tables and chairs, until one day it would be a room without warmth or light; the chess pieces would be buried in piles of dust. Circus tents would reappear in Marktplatz; children and old men would have to labor in the little factories under the tents, collecting ink dust and old rusty nails. These collectors would suffer from coughing fits and spasms after a month, as the ink dust landed in their lungs, and the Nazis would have to scamper for fresh recruits.
The settlers drank that Czech champagne and were relieved once the cotillion of clowns vanished from the dining hall and left them in peace. But the commandant’s helpmates didn’t allow them to sit for very long. They had to follow the cotillion to the café, where that gangster, Bernhard Beck, would be performing with the Theresienstädter Ensemble. They distrusted him, but at least Bernhard was their gangster, even if he collaborated with the SS and had bundles of kronen in every pocket. The Berliners among them had grown up with cabaret. And the others knew about the myth of Mackie Messer. They had photos of him at the Adlon. The gangster had once performed with Charlie Chaplin. He’d been engaged to Paulette Goddard for a week. Dietrich had adored him. No one could resist the king of cabaret.
The Café Kavalir had never held more than a few hundred souls. But it was packed with a thousand today; it felt as if half the camp had come to hear Mackie sing in that miserable broken voice of his. There were settlers outside, cluttering the sidewalks like a band of ghetto mice. Erik couldn’t even count the faces in the café windows. They looked worn and grim from his perch inside the Kavalir; they could have been spectral creatures, citizens of the night. And then a sudden path ripped right through the Kavalir, and a deep murmur, as the commandant elbowed his way to the platform where Bernhard stood alone. With him was Lisalein. The settlers gaped at her.
“The baroness, the baroness.”
She wore a black sheath under the commandant’s cape, with a doll’s powder on her cheeks, her lipstick like a raw red wound. She must have made some pact with the commandant, a promise that she wouldn’t scream at the diplomats. He wanted her there to watch a command performance by the Theresienstädter Ensemble for these royals of the Red Cross. But the ensemble was Bernard himself. He had no fellow actors or cohorts.
He stood on a tiny platform like some circus animal destined for a balancing act. But Bernard had no balloons on his nose. His cummerbund was his only costume. He made no introductory remarks. He didn’t even thank the commandant. He launched right into his act—it was his own special cabaret, without music or words. The maestro would sing with his haunted face.
Erik started to shiver. He sensed that something was wrong. But he couldn’t shout, Mackie, stop … before it’s too late. Who would have listened? No one at Theresienstadt would have dared interrupt the maestro, not even the Nazis themselves. Erik would have been dragged out of the café by his hair, would have been scalped. So he watched Bernhard Beck.
If the maestro couldn’t sing, he could still hum. He was his very own violin, but with wicked strings. He was humming a kind of madcap syncopated Brahms, while the expressions on his face shifted like some diabolic engine—first he was the Führer, in the midst of a speech, ogling Nazis, Jews, and diplomats in the café with that signature scowl of his, a plaintive look that could chill a man’s bones; Bernhard’s swollen body began to shrink. Hunkering down, he’d reduced himself to Hitler’s height, which only increased the menace. Erik saw a woman swoon; others turned away, or held a hand over their eyes, and muttered, “The Führer has come to Theresienstadt.”
The diplomats didn’t know what to think, so they nervously clapped their hands, while the Berlin Jews whispered, “Wunderbar,” and the maestro wiped away the Führer with one twist of his jowls and suddenly had a long, lugubrious face; he sucked in half of himself, grew tall and thin, until the crowd began to laugh and cry. “Herr Cesare,” they moaned.
Again the diplomats started to clap. Even Joachim laughed. Then Bernhard barreled out again, and he was Winston Churchill, lumbering along the tiny platform, pretending to bite into a fat cigar. The maestro was warming up; these were only curtain raisers at the Kavalir. Now he went into a whole skit. It was obvious from the subtle maneuvers of his body that the maestro was acting out the Red Cross’s royal visit to Theresienstadt. He squatted with an imaginary helmet over his eyes and clutched invisible handlebars; the maestro was an SS man on a motorbike, part of the Red Cross cortege. The image struck an immediate nerve, since the SS went nowhere in Theresienstadt without their motorbikes. Then Bernhard imitated all the monocle-men with their smug, owlish looks as they strutted about the camp, or lapped up their champagne.
The diplomats were no longer amused. But they were trapped inside the Kavalir, caught in that crush of people. And that’s when Erik saw the hint of a smile on Lisa’s powdered face. Bernhard hadn’t plotted alone. He must have made peace with the baroness. She was his unsung partner in the Theresienstädter Ensemble. She’d staged that flare-up among the elders, had scratched Bernhard’s cheek as the very first scene of their little sketch.
But Erik had misunderstood Bernhard’s genius. He hadn’t come here to mock the diplomats and reveal the travesty of their visit. He was after something else. And now he loomed over the entire audience, his body like a menacing snake. That swollen creature could only have been the Jews themselves, these settlers in Paradise, who would swallow up the SS, with all their barracks, moats, and battlements, and disgorge them into that tiny sea outside the walls.
It wasn’t a fanciful wish. Perhaps it was only a cabaret king who could understand that as multiple and protean as he might have been, he was still only a prisoner of his audience, their faint reflection. Theresienstadt was a Nazi cabaret. And it took an illusionist like Erik to comprehend its lines and lineaments. He’d never really won on his missions to Paris or Madrid; he’d entwined himself with other actors, and he was as much of a ghost as his victims. The SS could murder everyone in this camp, children and demented millionaires, and they themselves would fade into the reflections of those they had killed.
Of cours
e the commandant believed none of this. He clapped the loudest when Bernhard’s skit was done, but there was no human connection in his eyes, not even anger. The SS emptied half the café and shoved settlers from the sidewalks so that the diplomats could march to their black limousines. Then Joachim returned to the Kavalir with his own cadre of SS. He had that same mad disconnection in his eyes. There were no roundups or arrests. He moved from elder to elder and crushed the top hats on their heads. And while Joachim was in the midst of his own whirlwind, the maestro startled the café; like some capricious, wanton child, he burst into song. His voice hadn’t really betrayed him. He was Bernhard Beck of old Berlin, back at the Tingel-Tangel Club, where he first began. His eyes lit and bulged with the witchcraft of cabaret. He was no longer in the commandant’s kindergarten. He hopped off the platform and began to strut, his body winding like an unbreakable machine, while he reached into his pockets and flung all the kronen he’d collected at Joachim’s lackeys.
I’m Mack the Kike, my dears,
I run this camp ragged
And should a man complain
I sing out an old song
Send him to Paradise
And should a man complain
Send him to Paradise
The commandant seized Bernhard’s fist with its kronen, then he seized Bernhard, slapped him, and beat on his brains with a rifle butt. And when Erik tried to intervene, the SS created a wall around their commandant. He still would have rushed them if Lisa hadn’t held his hand.
“Darling,” she whispered, a deep melancholy on her scarred face, “you mustn’t meddle.”
And while the café watched, the commandant kicked and kicked Bernhard. The cabaret king never moaned or cried, but his fingers twitched inside their velvet gloves; his cummerbund heaved, and then he lay still.
Pola Negri
36
NO ONE KNEW IF THE CABARET KING WAS ALIVE OR DEAD. He hadn’t been carted to the crematorium in one of the hearses. He simply disappeared from Theresienstadt. The elders assumed he had been whisked across the aqueduct to the Little Fortress and would never be seen again. The baroness was as much of a mystery. She no longer appeared on the streets of Paradise, no longer visited the “lepers’ ward,” no longer sat on her palomino, with one of her half-wits tied to the saddle.
Lisa couldn’t get out of her hospital bed; her bones seemed about to shatter; her skin resembled slices of bark. Little Sister would bring her food, with messages from the commandant and flowers from his private garden. She tore up the messages and swallowed each flower like some cannibal. And when Joachim’s adjutant came near to button her nightdress, she’d attack him with her fork.
“Little Sister, I’ll stab your eye if you come one inch closer.”
He started to sniffle, but he wouldn’t invade her private territory. And she’d fall into a dream with her head between her knees. Not about Theresienstadt, or even about Erik or a missing cabaret king, but about her childhood in the Grunewald, her life as a lizard. Lisa was fourteen. She couldn’t bear being cooped up in a villa all the time, surrounded by other villas and trees. So she went to afternoon teas at the Adlon, accompanied by her chauffeur, Karl-Oskar, who was a bit of a snob, because his last employer was a bankrupt archduke. He liked to spit disgusting words in her ear, but if she rubbed up against him for five minutes in the baron’s Mercedes, Karl-Oskar would leave her alone.
It was 1930, and the Adlon was flooded with Jews and half-Jewish princesses, like herself. It must have been during the winter, because she wore wool stockings and a winter cape. She couldn’t have cared a pin about the teas or afternoon tangos in the Rembrandt Room. She liked to stroll in the Adlon’s wondrous reception hall, with light streaming on the pink and yellow marble pillars from some invisible window.
Lecherous old men would leer at her. She didn’t mind. She would curtsy to them and their mistresses, who had their own suites at the Adlon. There were also young sea captains and commanders and young tycoons, who sent messages to Karl-Oskar, asking for a rendezvous with “the little courtesan in the cape,” as they liked to call her. But she scoffed at them, which only made them shiver with delight.
And then Karl-Oskar arrived with another note—from Pola Negri, who was in exile after her first talkies. American audiences had tittered at her Polish accent and her interminable kisses on the screen. She was no jazz baby. She could swoon in bed, but her legs were too short to do wild kicks on top of a black piano. Lisa had seen none of Negri’s films, but she’d read about her in the Illustrirte. And she liked the curious pinch of her handwriting: Come to me at once. Pola.
Karl-Oskar escorted Lisa up to Negri’s suite, which was in the less fashionable side of the hotel, where piano teachers lived with retired opera singers. There wasn’t even a view of Pariser Platz. Negri was wearing a silver bandeau. She was rather plump for a movie star, and Lisa stood next to her like a colossus, rising above Negri’s frizzled hair and painted eyelashes.
“Child,” she said, “you’re a criminal.”
And Lisa wanted to laugh. She was already in love with this tiny woman, who seemed so preposterous, so out of place as a vamp. Without her bandeau, she could have been a pretty charwoman on one of the Adlon’s lesser floors.
“And why do you call me a criminal, Fraulein?”
“I am Pola, please. I have watched you strut around the hotel, and I didn’t even have the courage to introduce myself. You gave me palpitations—a child with the ferocious stance of a leopard or a lion.”
Lisa dismissed Karl-Oskar, sent him downstairs with two hundred marks, while the plump little vamp began to shiver. “I’m afraid of you, child.”
“As you should be.”
Lisa closed her eyes and flung off her cape. And Negri kissed her everywhere, sobbing and shivering, and playing upon her body as if Lisa were nothing more than a flute with folds of flesh.
Lisa had to bribe Karl-Oskar, who didn’t want money, but sexual favors. So she had to tolerate a few minutes of his fumbling, either on the backseat of the Mercedes or in a darkened alcove of the Adlon.
“Are you finished, Karl-Oskar? I couldn’t feel a thing.”
“You shouldn’t say such awful words,” the chauffeur grumbled. “I might tell your father where you go every other afternoon.”
“I wish you would, Karl. And while you’re at it, tell him who drives me there and begs me for disgusting little treats.”
It was Lisa’s first love affair, and she kept a journal, without mentioning Negri by name. But it didn’t last. The actress left for England, and scribbled a note. Auf Wiedersehen, my adorable leopard. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
And when she returned to the Adlon several years later, she was even less of a movie star. Most of her allure was gone. Her cheeks were puffed out, but it wasn’t that. Her eyes weren’t in focus, and it seemed as if she no longer cared about the irregular music of Lisa’s body. The actress had turned into a trampoline artist who trained in bed. Lisa never saw her again. But the tale had its own unusual twist. After she was brought back from Sachsenhausen forest with burns all over her body, and her father was dead and buried, it was a Gestapo officer who gave her the death certificate while she was convalescing at the Jewish Hospital. She looked under his visor. It was Karl-Oskar, a little sadder perhaps, but with the same lascivious face. He’d demanded a Jewish headstone in the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee. He’d had a service sung, even though it must have been dangerous for him.
“Your father was very kind to me, Frau Lisa. It was the least I could do.”
He clicked his heels and kissed her hand.
“But I wasn’t so kind to you, Karl. I teased you all the time.”
“They were the happiest moments in my life,” he said, starting to cry. “But I am so ashamed. I took advantage of a little girl.”
“Dear Karl, I wasn’t so little. I was as tall as I am now. And I’m the one who took advantage of you.”
Kark-Oskar patted his eyes with the fingers of his
glove. “No, no, gnädige Frau, but at least we were conspirators.”
He clicked his heels again and walked out of the Extrastation, and she lay back in her enormous crib with high rails that kept her from spilling onto the hospital floor. And now she was in another kind of crib, without rails, in another Extrastation, a privileged ward that belonged to the SS. She was the only patient in this hospital. She kept a knife and fork under her blanket, and if the commandant sneaked upstairs on the toes of his splendid boots, she would blind him in a minute.
She heard a noise. She gripped her knife. It was the commandant. His blouse was filthy, and his plum-colored boots were covered with dust and straw. He hadn’t shaved.
“I’ll kill you,” she said.
He cackled at her. “Kill me? Why? I’ve brought you a friend.”
Ännchen lingered behind the commandant. She was frightened of the knife in Lisa’s hand and her face of white bark. She began to blubber. “Nico,” she said over and over again, and imitated the broken strides of Lisa’s half-blind horse. It tore at Lisa to see that stricken child.
“Joachim,” she whispered. “Take her away. I look like death.”
“Ah,” the commandant said. “But she can’t survive without Nicodemus. And if you aren’t nice to me, I’ll turn that horse into glue.”
“Take her away. Please.”
Joachim shouted for his adjutant. “You heard milady. Deliver the girl to her barrack. Make sure she isn’t harmed.”
Little Sister arrived, utterly out of breath, his uniform unbuttoned. But when he tried to grab Ännchen’s hand, she lurched away, ran up to Lisa, and touched that white bark. Then she started to laugh and led Little Sister out of the Extrastation in the attic, hobbling like Nicodemus.
Lisa was still clutching the knife. The commandant leaned a little closer to her.
“You shouldn’t have conspired with Bernhard Beck. He betrayed us. He was supposed to deliver pure entertainment to the Red Cross.”
Cesare Page 28
