“It was pure entertainment,” Lisa said. She was coughing now. She turned away and spat dark phlegm into a little jar.
“I’ll send for one of the Jew doctors,” the commandant said. “He should have a look at your lungs.”
“I don’t need a doctor.…”
The commandant leaned closer still. “Baroness, I was impetuous, I admit. But we paid Bernhard to perform. He was the richest man in Theresienstadt. And he made fools of us in front of the Red Cross. I had to punish him.”
“You should have punished me.”
A smile broke under the commandant’s blond mustache. “I did. Do you think I would have kicked him to pieces if you hadn’t been there?”
“Idiot,” she told him. “Bernhard welcomed your boots. It was part of his cabaret.”
The commandant began to brood. “He could have gone to America with the magician. That was part of the deal. I would have let him out of here.”
How could she penetrate the skull of this murderer with the blond mustache? Bernhard Beck was a woeful man. He could not bear to see his own face in the mirror. He despised himself for having turned Theresienstadt into the Reich’s own fairy tale. He should never, never have made that film. It was the only time in his life that the cabaret king had ever betrayed his art. And yet he allowed the cameras into the camp, he performed in front of his own crew, charmed all the men and women from the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and ended up blaming Theresienstadt, blaming himself. And so he’d become a kind of werewolf, preying on the settlers, feeding off them while he fed on his own thickened flesh. It was Joachim who rescued him from his torment; each kick was a masterpiece, the final measure of Bernhard’s show. But he was still one more victim of Paradise.…
“Joachim, where did you hide his body?”
“I don’t hide bodies. He’ll be buried in Berlin as a Yid who martyred himself for the Reich.”
“Then Bernhard will laugh at you from his grave.”
She started to rise from her crib. She didn’t need to blind the commandant, or puncture his throat. He was tucked away in his own hell. But she grew dizzy and almost dropped her knife.
“Darling,” she said, “I hope we sit together through eternity.”
“Where?” he asked, delighted with the idea.
“At your favorite Jewish museum. You will be the central artifact, with your magnificent boots, and perhaps the reins of your horse. If we vanish, darling, so will you. Now get out of my sight.”
“But I’ll take you to Berlin, to the Charité. I’ll have the best doctors.…”
“If you come here again, I’ll cut off your prick and hang it with all your other black pennants.”
He stood there, bewildered in his dusty boots. And then he disappeared from the attic.
She must have slept for half an hour. Her tongue was made of lead. Her ears were ringing. She heard blond girls weeping in a closet. She was soothing them, stroking them, arousing the fever in their blood. And then the girls were gone. A pair of boots scraped against the floorboards. She gripped her knife. But it wasn’t Joachim. It was her mournful magician.
“Erik, I’m going mad. I can’t stop thinking of Berlin. We were all Hitler’s helpmates.… I chose my submariners. I never saved the youngest children.”
Erik couldn’t bear to look at the agony in her eyes.
“Lisa, they couldn’t have survived alone in a little closet. They would have whimpered all night … and the Gestapo would have arrested the families who took them in.”
“I saved only the prettiest girls, all blondes—and I made love to them, Erik. I turned some of them into my own whores.… I should have carried a whip.”
“Stop it. You did save young children.”
“Never,” she said, with the glare of a chicken hawk.
Erik took the knife out of her hand. “You stole young children from the SS during the factory raid—fifty of them.”
“That doesn’t count,” she said. “That was bravura. I used them as pawns … the way I use Joachim when he isn’t trampling on settlers at the Café Kavalir. Can’t you see? I loved you and hated you in your SS uniform. It was the perfect punishment.”
He kissed her crazed eyes, rocked her in his arms. It was his fault. He had played the SS man with Lisa in Berlin, had wanted to bruise her with his silver buttons.
“We have to run,” he said. “Joachim will skin us alive.”
But Lisa couldn’t run. She closed her eyes, slept with her knees against his chest, like someone who had been born out of his sinews and bones. And then she felt herself fall; she landed inside a barrack with poor little Ännchen, who was suddenly a giantess. Lisa didn’t recognize a single millionaire or blind woman from the mica factory, or elders and human horses with their hearses. This barrack didn’t have one broken toilet or wounded wall. She could have been inside the gallery of an extravagant whorehouse; both men and women were on display—she knew them all; there was Pola Negri in her silver bandeau, and her own father, wearing lipstick and behaving like a whore. But the moment she went up to him, he ran behind a pillar.
“I’m so ashamed,” he said, “so ashamed.”
But she couldn’t even touch his face. Then she saw Bernard Beck smoking a cigarette.
“Mackie,” she whispered, “are you with the living, or have you crossed over the bridge?”
He, too, was wearing lipstick. “It makes no difference, darling.”
Ännchen’s shoulders began to heave, but she didn’t have to whimper. Her voice was clear and crisp. “I’m frightened, Fräulein Lisa.”
“But we’re among friends.”
Ännchen held to Lisa’s hand like a brutal vise. Lisa was all out of breath. Then Pola went up to Lisa and the girl. She had a terrible lust in her eye. She’d grown fat in this bordello.
“Stay with us,” she whispered. But Lisa ran and ran with Ännchen, her fingers crushed in the girl’s grip. The barrack had no exits, and she grew weaker and weaker with every step.
Dancing with the Dead
37
SHE WAS UTTERLY MAD IN THE MORNING. Her hawk’s glare had returned. Erik couldn’t even hold her gaze. He’d sat beside her crib all night.
“Mensch,” she said, “put on your Nazi uniform.”
Erik didn’t know how to answer. “It’s falling apart,” he finally said. “It’s a hobo’s paradise.”
“Put it on.”
His hands trembled; he buttoned himself into his blouse and dreaded what he saw in the mirror over her bed. His uniform looked like a rotting glove.
“My little magician,” she cooed, “did you bring your Montblanc? Are you wearing it inside your pants?”
He started to cry like the orphan he had always been. He couldn’t lie down with her in that uniform, but he did.
“Mensch,” she growled, “how much will you pay Little Lisa? Do you think you can fuck for free?”
Her cheeks started to quiver, but when he tried to stop the quivering, she slapped his hand away.
“You mustn’t touch.… What can you pay?”
He was caught in some riddle he couldn’t survive. “In blood or money?” he asked.
She snickered and sat up in bed.
“I don’t want your filthy lucre, or your blood. I want your fountain pen.”
He’d lost it at sea, on his voyage to America. He’d carried that Montblanc everywhere, on all his missions, but had misplaced it on board the Milchkuh while battling Fränze and her Nazi sailors. “Schwester Lisa,” he said, but she put her hand over his mouth.
“Shhh.”
She never spoke another word. She was as mute as Ännchen, who only warbled in Lisa’s dreams. The dead came to visit her. She sat with them at the Café Kavalir. She wasn’t uncomfortable around them. They whispered her name. But she couldn’t whisper back. There was every sort of freak at Theresienstadt—a Jewish SS man, a Jewish monk, a Jewish nun, who fell afoul of Hitler’s racial laws. But they weren’t with the dead. Th
ey had to wander among the living, scrounge for food, like other settlers. Lisa could hear them wail. She herself was too fatigued to cry. It hurt Lisa to have sounds inside her head. Her skull vibrated like a timpani drum. Her skin had begun to peel. She couldn’t drift downstairs to the toilet, like a somnambulist. She had to piss into a pan. The water she passed was blue. She remembered what Rosa Luxemburg had recited to the children of Sheunenviertel: We kill the hunter so that you won’t have to weep.
Both her eyes were shot with blood. She saw the magician’s face, saw him grieve for her. The timpani drum was rattling again with words she’d never announce. She loved him as much as she could ever love a man. He’d followed her right to Theresienstadt. He’d have found her in a sand dune, under an empty well, or inside an attic near Paradise’s southern gate.…
Erik couldn’t even feed her compote from the commandant’s own kitchen. She ate nothing at all. Her students weren’t allowed inside the pavilion, but Erik sneaked them upstairs to the attic. They sang to Lisa, showed her their compositions and drawings, but her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on the colors or words.
“Baroness,” the children cried, “we cannot continue our classes without you. You must get better promise.”
Her skin turned to paper. Erik groomed her, combed her white hair, washed the crust from her eyelids, wet her mouth with a sponge. He was only a secret agent who had willed death on other people. He wanted to move her bed as close as he could to the attic window so she might have a look at the mountains, but she died in transit, midway to the window, with the sunlight on her paper skin.
He carried her out of the attic, her arms dangling at his knees. He had no destination. There was a Jewish cemetery outside the walls, not far from the little delousing station, which was each settler’s introduction to Theresienstadt. But Erik wasn’t in the mood to bury Lisa or deliver her to the chapel on Südstrasse.
He didn’t have much of a journey. The commandant met him on the stairs with his bull-necked adjutant. Both of them were horrified.
“Herr Cesare,” Joachim said, “I let you have her while she was alive. You will give her to me now.”
He was in his nightshirt and his stockings; his nails had torn through the wool.
“Fool,” he rasped, his shoulders starting to shake. “I brought you here, not the Americans. It was my gift to the baroness. She couldn’t survive without a glimpse of your gloomy face. So I bargained with those idiots at Norfolk. I gave them some meaningless numbers about the SS in Bohemia, numbers I pulled out of my hat. And I told them all about Mackie Messer. Their admirals knew nothing of Berlin cabaret, or of Beck. But I was counting on Werner Wolfe. ‘Wunderbar,’ he said. He was convinced that Mackie would be a star in the United States.”
“Then why, why did you beat the life out of Beck?”
“On a whim,” he said, looking at Lisa’s dangling arms while he scratched himself with a toenail. “It was more than a whim. It was to hurt her, to break her heart, she and her Theresienstädter Ensemble. The admirals at Norfolk will never miss Beck.… Now hand her over to me.”
Erik couldn’t maneuver on the attic stairs. He tried to lurch past Joachim and his adjutant, but he couldn’t hold on to Lisa and attack with his elbows. Little Sister wept into his handkerchief and struck Erik twice with the buckle of his belt. Erik tottered on the stairs, then tumbled past Little Sister and Joachim, tumbled headlong down a winding flight, the banister rails digging into his back, and landed on the bottom stair with plenty of splinters in his scalp and Lisa still in his arms.
The Magician
38
HE DIDN’T KNOW WHY, BUT HE WENT STRAIGHT to the Magdeburg Barracks like a true somnambulist and had the tailors sew a yellow star onto his SS tunic. They weren’t eager to do so. They realized with every stitch that Joachim would blame them. Goyim weren’t allowed to parade in yellow stars. Only the king of Denmark had that privilege. And that’s because he’d tried to embarrass the SS and also save his Jews from the transport trucks. But Erik Holdermann was a German warrior, wearing the uniform of the Death’s-Heads. Still, they couldn’t refuse this mournful man. They saw the distress in his dark eyes. And they let him escape with a yellow star.
There was pandemonium within five minutes. The SS guards circled around Erik on their motorbikes. Then Little Sister arrived, his countenance raw with rage.
“Herr Magician, this is not how to mourn the baroness. You slander her, I think. You are not a settler, and you are not a Jew.”
There was already an SS man at Theresienstadt who had to wear a star, with Jewish grandparents hiding in his ancestral tree. At first, this SS man was scorned by the settlers. But after a month or so, they took him in. He’d been reared a Catholic, and he remained a Catholic at Theresienstandt. That was the strange democracy of the camp, where Catholics and Lutherans had their own “synagogue.” But no one had asked Erik to wear a star. He wasn’t masquerading as the king of Denmark. Nor was he trying to be a martyr. It comforted Erik, made him feel that Lisa resided in him somewhere.
And Little Sister shouldn’t have pounced on him with a cudgel. Erik cracked his windpipe with the flat of his hand. Joachim’s adjutant writhed on the ground, his windpipe rattling as he choked to death. The SS guards leapt at Erik with their motorbikes. He swatted them away with his fist; one of the motorbikes landed in a tree. They had never battled anyone who could dance like a dervish with a yellow star. Finally, they were clever enough to hop off their bikes. It took a dozen of them to subdue Erik with their chains and their whips, while half the camp watched from the pavilions and the roofs of their barracks. It was much more satisfying than the show they had put on for the Red Cross, or the time they acted in Bernard Beck’s propaganda film. It was the film that had troubled them the most—laughing into the camera like skeletons with leaping, animated bones. They never recovered from that ordeal. They didn’t have a Nazi director to urge them on. It was Mackie Messer with his megaphone. He paid them in kronen. They couldn’t destroy the bills. Paper was as scarce as sardines.
And now they had a magician who could send motorbikes into a tree. The Czech Jews saw this magician as a man of clay, a golem who had walked out of some dusty attic in Prague and would massacre all the Nazis in Theresienstadt. But they sat like dumb children and couldn’t even help while the guards dragged their golem across the ghetto, wrapped in chains.
THESE MURDERERS COULD HAVE HID ERIK in one of the underground cells of the Little Fortress, a river away, where none of the settlers would have noticed him, not even from the battlements, but the commandant wanted to make a spectacle of the Abwehr’s own somnambulist. And so they threw him into the cellar of the commandant’s pavilion, with common thieves and black-market men who forgot to share their profits with the SS. He lived among the cockroaches; lice crawled along his eyebrows. There wasn’t a spark of heat from the stones. He had gruel in the morning and gruel at night.
One of the commandant’s lackeys would parade him a little after dawn with a rope around his neck. His mind would drift. Suddenly, he was wandering in Scheunenviertel, a motherless child with the raw-boned Jewish prostitutes fanning their summer skirts in that tepid, stillborn air as they manufactured their own breeze.
“Little boy, would you like to peek inside my bloomers? It will cost you a pfennig.”
He remembered—his loins stirred. He blushed. His heart beat like a disconsolate drum as he dreamt of that secret hill under their bloomers.
But the same whores who had taunted him with the cruel mystery of female flesh also sneaked Erik into the Jewish orphanage on the Rosenstrasse. And so he had a little nation of godmothers who couldn’t even rescue themselves. How many had been beaten to death by SS officers who didn’t find a single one pretty enough or blond enough to save?
Joachim visited him every day, sometimes in his nightshirt, sometimes in his riding boots, sometimes in his bare feet. He always brought a delicacy with him—strudel from a secret shop in Prague—and a pot of coffee m
ade with real chicory.
“Magician, they drink this stuff in New Orleans.… Why haven’t you tried to strangle me?”
“You’d like it too much, you perverted prick.”
Joachim chortled to himself. He loved Erik’s insolence. No one else had been insolent with him in this crumbling fortress town, apart from Lisa herself.
“We’re preparing your death warrant, you know. It’s not so easy to kill a man with a Ritterkreuz. It requires a special stamp. But we have the forgers now, your old chums at the Abwehr. We could stand you under the scaffold in the Little Fortress. But it wouldn’t be dignified. You’ll get the guillotine. It’s coming from Bavaria. There are expenses involved. And you haven’t much in the way of kin—just a renegade uncle who was run over by the Gestapo last month in Munich. So we’ll charge your execution to the admiral. Canaris will pay dearly for your loss.”
And now Erik did leap off his cot, but he tripped over his chains, and Joachim started to laugh.
“Some magician you are.… No one can save you. The admiral hasn’t one string left to pull. He’s persona non grata at the Chancellery.… But it’s strange. I envy you. I have Lisa’s ashes, but I never had her love.”
“Schwanz, it’s a powerful aphrodisiac when you set someone on fire after breaking her kneecaps.”
Joachim ripped his strudel in half and shared it with Erik. “See, you’ve grown talkative. Now we can have a genuine engagement, a tête-à-tête.… Erik, I only did it out of pique. Even while she was burning she spat in my face. But whom will I talk with about Lisa when you’re gone? I’ll be lonelier than ever. Just say you never loved her, and I’ll let you live.”
Joachim had the look of an eager little boy, one who was waiting to tear the wings off a fly. And Erik realized that he could have fueled Joachim’s obsession day after day, long after the guillotine arrived, could have played some forlorn Scheherazade, feeding lies rather than fanciful tales to this mad commandant.
Cesare Page 29
