He had reached the outer limits of tragedy. His catastrophe continued to play out alongside world catastrophe. The fall of Europe, that collective descent into madness, is contained in that final sighting of Friedl on the floor of her cell, staring ahead, obsessively bending back her legs to breaking point.
She was ultimately transferred from the Steinhof sanatorium in Vienna to a country institution in Mauer-Öhling, a place where patients were put to work on farms and employed as cheap labour in homes around the locality. When it was first opened during the Habsburg era, Emperor Franz Joseph said it was a wonderful place to be mad.
Roth fled Vienna the day before Hitler marched into the city. He made his way back to Paris and continued writing and drinking himself to death. He became reunited with her briefly in his last novel. At the age of forty-four, he died in agony of delirium tremens in a hospital for the poor in Paris – 27 May 1939.
On 15 July 1940, they came to take Friedl away from the institution at Mauer-Öhling. She was brought by train to Linz. There she was placed on a black bus. One of those unmarked black buses that were used at night for transporting young people from the small towns into Linz to go to the cinema. The journey from there didn’t take too long. She arrived at Schloss Hartheim, a castle which had for many years been in the hands of the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, who had looked after mentally disabled children. When the nuns were being removed from the facility, one of them had asked if she could take some of the children with her, but that request had been refused. The castle was refitted with communal showers and ovens. The chimney stacks were put into regular use, with smoke drifting across the district even in summer when it was warm. People had to close their windows. The human smoke hung around the rooms like a thought that could not be expressed or eliminated. The black bus drove through the open gates into the central courtyard. There she was told to step out and brought inside. She was taken straight to the showers and told to remove her clothes.
Frieda Roth. 1900–1940.
43
Lena went to the airport to meet him. She stood in the arrivals area with her arms folded, checking the flight monitor. She kept her eyes on the doors, watching people being matched up at times in the most unlikely reunions. When Mike came out, it took a moment before she could be sure it was him. His beard, his height, his clothes. His eyes searched through the waiting crowd without seeing her, as though he was looking for somebody else entirely. She rushed forward to embrace him. She kissed him hard on the lips and stood back. She smiled and wiped her eyes with her wrist.
In the taxi they held hands.
Outside the hotel he paid the driver. He had only one single case – he was travelling light. He wore walking boots. Camouflage trousers. A jacket with buttoned-down military pockets across the chest.
They had a room looking out towards the station at Friedrichstrasse, where the various local and long-distance trains were pulling in and out under the arched roof, far enough away to be silent, like a miniature train set.
They kissed.
They said each other’s names three or four times.
Christ, Lena, he said. Now I know exactly how much I missed you.
She felt his beard and said – I love it. Makes you look like you’ve been out in the forest. Your arms, have you been chopping wood?
The Italian restaurant they went to was situated on Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. Named after the revolutionary who got shot on his bicycle, Lena explained. It was white tablecloths. There was a row of tables along the wall, a long bar and some further tables at the back next to tall windows. The restaurant was quite full. There was a good volume of voices. They kept forgetting to look at the menu and the waiter had to give them more time. She laughed – let’s concentrate. He ordered lamb chops, she ordered tuna. They asked for a platter of antipasti to start with and he selected the wine.
It was a matter of closing the gaps. Their conversation was at times close and also dislocated. It was almost a geographical thing. Looking at each other across the table as if it were the Atlantic.
She told him about getting the U-Bahn out to the airport, how a man in the carriage started singing in English. He was so out of it he kept repeating the same words, about lovers being separated by the salt seas. Don’t you think that’s crazy, she said, the coincidence.
There was a pause.
What’s happening with your mom? she asked.
It’s tough, he said. I was down there yesterday helping her to pack up. It will take a while for the sale to go through, but I thought it was better to get her settled right away. She’s renting for a while. She was eager to get out. The atmosphere is toxic. The neighbours put these dogs into the parking lot, big black security dogs running free.
You know what happened, Mike said. She could find no on-street parking one day, so she drove in around the back. She saw the gates were open. To hell with it. One last time. Then she got trapped. The dogs kept her pinned inside the car. Jumping up at the windows, slobbering all over the glass. Two enormous Rottweilers. The owners next door must have let them out when they saw my mother arriving, because the gates were closed behind her. She had to sit there in the car. She couldn’t get out. Every time she even so much as moved to pick up her phone, they were up again, snarling at her through the glass. The car door is full of scratches, Lena.
That’s frightening for her.
She left messages for me, Mike said, but I was in a meeting. She was there for nearly an hour.
Did she not call the police?
This is it, Mike said. She called the retired cop at the back, Dan Mulvaney. And guess what, he came running out with his rifle. He climbed over the fence and shot both dogs point-blank. One of them was lunging at the cop when he got blasted, my mother said. It was like watching some horror movie. Two big black beasts lying dead on the tarmac.
One of them with half his head ripped off and all his teeth showing, Mike said, like he had bitten off his own face.
Jesus.
My mother said Dan escorted her past the dead dogs, back to the house. He carried her groceries and she invited him inside to sit for a while and have a coffee. She asked him to leave the rifle outside.
She should sue.
She’s glad to be out of there, Mike said. She was beginning to feel like a stranger in her own country. She didn’t even want to go back to get her stuff. Everything was still there in my room. There’s no way I can bring it up to New York. A big dumpster full of my things. I kept my baseball mitt. The hardest thing was trying to stop myself looking over everything, remembering every moment of my childhood. That would have taken years, I would still be there.
She has some peace of mind now, Lena said.
She’s thinking of moving to California to be with her sister. That’s the long-term plan. The weather in Iowa is getting to her. I think she wants a clean break.
Lena took his hand across the table.
How about you, he said. You got to see your uncle in Magdeburg,
Look, she said.
She reached into her bag and pulled me out. She showed him the map at the back.
Henning gave me directions, she said. It’s near the Polish border. We can get there by train.
I have a meeting in Frankfurt, he said.
I waited for you, Mike.
It’s an important client, he said. I need to get that out of the way, Lena.
So, it’s a business trip.
No way, he said. I’ve got plans. Wait till you see.
Mike, I need you to go with me, she said. I think there’s something out there. I don’t know what it is, but I want you to come with me and find it.
I have everything booked, he said. Your birthday. Big surprise. Transylvania.
This is something I’ve got to do, she said.
There was an excitement in his voice as he began to unfold his plans. Firs
t thing, he would go to Frankfurt and sort out his business connections. Then he would meet her in Bucharest. From there they would go to a city in the mountains called Brașov. A beautiful old German town, he said. I have a tour guide set up, he said. Răzvan is going to take us in his jeep to a place where we start walking through a beech forest that goes on for miles. Then we stay in a small town, meant to be the most diverse biosphere in Europe. The farming techniques are unchanged for centuries, still the same raised stack of hay in every farm, courtyards enclosed to protect the animals from wolves and bears. Lots of Gypsies, some of them living without electricity. We’ll celebrate your birthday at two thousand metres, Lena. There’s a sheep farm up there, Răzvan tells me, the shepherds cook up the cheese on site, so fresh – that will be our meal, out in the open, with plum brandy.
We’ll stay in one of the monasteries, he went on. Răzvan has it arranged, a place way up at the top of a mountain. It takes five hours on foot to get there. Slap in the middle of nowhere. The monks are completely self-sufficient, living on a plateau where they grow their own crops and keep cattle and sheep. Their bread is meant to be amazing, so Răzvan told me – he was there once and the abbot had flour on his hands while he was pointing to his cell. It’s completely off the grid. No tourist would dream of it. Just the two of us, Lena. Like going back four or five centuries. All you hear at night is the clacking of wood as the monks are called to prayer in the dark. It’s the last chance to go back that far in time. It will blow your mind.
We might have to stay in different cells, he added.
She smiled and said – separate quarters.
You can sneak over to my cell in the middle of the night, he said. After all the clacking of wood and the monks have gone back to their cells and it’s silent again. I’ll leave the door open for you.
Hope I get the right room, she said.
The main dishes arrived. His lamb cutlets were arranged like a tepee beside a hill of shredded cabbage and some French fries in the shape of a log fire. Her tuna slice was a plinth erected on a base of potato discs, beside a pool of plum sauce. He began eating right away. She picked up her knife and fork and cut into the soft flesh of the tuna, chargrilled with criss-crossed black lines.
Maybe one or two touristy things, Mike said. Like the famous Peleș Castle, where the former communist leader Ceaușescu used to stay. He made it his summer house, where he would go hunting. They say his officials used to catch a bear live and let it loose on the lawns so their leader could wake up in the morning and shoot it from his room. And he was such a lousy shot, Mike said, they had a marksman ready in the wings to shoot the bear for him. Their leader thought it was just the echo of his own rifle ringing around the walls of the castle.
Mike laughed as he ate. He picked up one of the lamb chops in his fingers. He chewed with great hunger. Now and then he took his napkin and wiped his mouth, cleaning his fingers before he picked up his wine glass.
I was hoping to do a bit of hunting myself, he said. At the end of the trip. Răzvan has it all lined up. Licence, shotgun, everything. I know that wouldn’t interest you, Lena, he said, so his wife Gabi said she would be very happy to take you to see Dracula’s castle. That’s a bit fake, maybe, you might prefer to go visit one of the salt mines. Amazing, like a huge cathedral underground, where people play football matches under lights, really good for pulmonary conditions.
Lena was slow about eating her food, as though her appetite had been questioned and she would rather have ordered something else.
That bear, she said. I won’t be able to stop thinking about him, Mike. Making his way around the mountains, eating berries, leaves, grass, roots, happy in himself. All that slow time, and he’s already dead.
He sensed her resistance.
Trust me, Lena, this is going to be great. I’ll catch up with you after the hunt. We’ll continue going up north to see some of the painted churches. I swear to God, Lena, we’re going to be the inventors of happiness.
She looked at him in silence and put her fork down. She laid her hand on my face and paused for a moment before she spoke.
I’ve got to do this, she said.
Why are you so hung up about that book?
I was counting on you, Mike.
Lena, I’m not going out there to dig up some Jewish people’s belongings, he said. Is that what you’re looking for? Some hoard. If you find something, you have to declare it. You know that, Lena. You can’t just dig it up and own it.
That’s not what I’m after, Mike.
The landowner gets half.
The owners of that land took it from the Jewish people who lived there up to the Second World War. If I find something out there, I would have no intention of keeping it, Mike. You know me better than that.
Who owns it, then?
I would try and return it to the legal owners. And if that didn’t work, I would find some other cause.
The state will get most of it.
Look, I’m not interested in treasure.
You could say it was given to you by your uncle, he said. That way you would keep the landowners out. But the state will ultimately claim it and give you a percentage. It’s not worth the trouble.
What I want is the story, she said. What this means to us, Mike, you and me. I want us to go together and find what’s out there.
Mike wiped his mouth with the napkin again and picked me up in his hands. He started leafing through the pages and soon came across the page with the swastika.
What’s this?
She began to explain what had happened.
Remember how the book got stolen, she said. And this man found it in the park. The guy from Chechnya. His name is Armin Schneider. His sister is the singer, Madina Schneider. With the prosthetic leg, remember. I sent you some of her links. So, there’s this thing that happened, you see, one of the pages got cut out.
And then it was sent as a death threat, with that swastika. We had to go to the police, me and Armin.
Mike stopped eating.
It’s become part of my art, she said. This man’s life. His injuries from the war in Chechnya. He lost his parents. He’s got all these shrapnel wounds.
Mike placed his knife and fork down to listen.
I’ve asked him for his X-ray, Lena said. It will show three black shapes of metal inside his body. My plan is to base my artwork on this X-ray and whatever else I can find out about him. It’s going to be a visual story of his life.
Looking across the table into her eyes, Mike laid his napkin down beside his plate.
You don’t have to tell me, he said.
He stood up without another word and walked away.
There was some delay before Lena could react.
Mike, she called after him.
He continued making his way out along the passage between the bar and the tables by the wall, putting his jacket on as he went.
Was this a remake of Effi Briest? Should I not have held on to the facts a little longer? Should I not have let the story find its own truth underneath the prose, to be discovered later? Here I was, giving away the plot. The whole conceit was being tragically exposed.
Lena picked me up and threw me into her bag as if she was angry with me for letting her down. She walked after him through the restaurant, almost breaking into a run. She stopped to tell the waiter she would be back in a moment to pay. Once she managed to get some cash. He seemed to understand the urgency. He spoke to her in Italian – prego.
Leaving behind her coat, she ran into the street and saw Mike walking away, some distance ahead.
Mike, please.
She followed him into the station at Friedrichstrasse. This used to be the border crossing between East and West. It had been part of her plan to show him all those places. The remainder of the Wall, the tunnels, the Stasi headquarters with the desk where Erich Mielke used to sit and
direct his surveillance operations. The spot on the opera house square where the book-burning took place, where they now had the monument underground with the empty white shelves. Here she was running onto a platform, calling across the tracks to a man who turned out to be somebody else, not Mike at all.
She tried calling him on her phone.
No reply.
There was nothing left to do but go back to the hotel and wait for him there.
This was all my fault. I had made her come to Berlin. I had brought Armin into her life. I had started this blind narrative experiment, marching into an uncharted story without thinking through the consequences. Had I not seen this happen a million times before in all those books that Henning kept on the shelves of his library? Had I not learned enough about life to know that love never stands still, it keeps moving like water, it runs away and comes back, it spins in a clockwise direction?
She stood watching the trains coming and going through the great arch. That bowed roof. Bombed during the war, leaving a locomotive hanging at an angle on twisted metal tracks. She poured a glass of water from a bottle. I could hear the cap twisting off. I could hear the fizz. I’m not sure she even drank any of it. She went back to staring at the trains, waiting for him to arrive on one of those platforms like a passenger from some unknown place in the East, perhaps. After some time, she lay down on the bed uncovered, with her shoes still on, as though she might have to get up at any moment and go.
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